AI Visibility pillar / check attorney-authorship-credentials
Attorney authorship and credentials
Checks that legal content shows who wrote or reviewed it, through an attorney byline or Person schema with credential properties.
By Shimon Carroll, Founder, SEO for AI Agents · Last updated
What this check measures
Visible bylines such as "Jane Doe, Esq." or "written by", and Person or Attorney JSON-LD with a name plus any of hasCredential, honorificSuffix, jobTitle, memberOf, alumniOf, or knowsAbout.
Why it matters
Google’s guidance on helpful content asks whether it is self-evident who authored the content and whether pages carry a byline where one might be expected, with extra trust scrutiny for Your Money or Your Life topics such as legal matters. Credential markup gives search engines and AI answers a verifiable author entity.
How we score it
A review prompt, not a legal verdict. Runs only on law firm audits. When the cue is missing the finding is low severity at medium confidence, which lowers the ai visibility pillar by about 0.6 points. A pass is informational and never scores. Each finding names who should review it, quotes what we saw on the page, and cites the primary source. Where the page shows a US address we name the inferred state; otherwise the wording is state-agnostic.
Confidence-flag rules
MEDIUM: the check reads the visible page text, links, and JSON-LD directly, so what it quotes is exact, but wording can carry the same meaning in phrasing we do not recognise, and one page does not show the whole site.
Common mistakes
- Publishing legal guides under the firm name with no attorney named.
- Credential markup that claims certifications the lawyer does not hold.
- Bylines that do not link to a bio with admissions and practice areas.
How to fix it
Add a named attorney byline or "reviewed by" line to legal content, link it to a bio with bar admissions, and mark the attorney up as a Person with jobTitle, memberOf, and hasCredential. Keep every claim accurate.
Primary sources
- Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
Google Search Central
- schema.org hasCredential property
schema.org
Changelog
- · New. This rule used to live only in the vertical configuration and never ran. It is now a registered review check with a cited primary source, framed as a prompt to review with a professional rather than a pass or fail legal verdict.