AI Visibility pillar / check clinician-authorship-credentials
Clinician authorship and credentials
Checks that a medical site shows a named clinician with credentials, a medical-review line, or credentialed schema.
By Shimon Carroll, Founder, SEO for AI Agents · Last updated
What this check measures
Visible clinician names with credentials (for example "Jane Doe, M.D." or "Dr. Roe"), a "medically reviewed by" line, Physician or Person JSON-LD with credential properties, or a reviewedBy property on any node.
Why it matters
Health content is a Your Money or Your Life topic. Google’s guidance asks whether it is clear who created content and whether bylines appear where expected, and its rater guidelines weigh expertise heavily for medical topics. A named, credentialed clinician is the clearest trust signal for visitors and AI answers.
How we score it
A review prompt, not a legal verdict. Runs only on medical practice audits. When the cue is missing the finding is medium severity at medium confidence, which lowers the ai visibility pillar by about 2.4 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
- Clinical articles published under the practice name only.
- Listing a medical reviewer who did not actually review the page.
- Credentials in an image or logo that crawlers cannot read.
How to fix it
Name the clinician who wrote or reviewed each health page, with credentials, the review date, and a link to their bio. Mark it up with Physician or Person and reviewedBy. Never add a reviewer who did not review the page.
Primary sources
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.