Editorial metadata — agent readiness

Why an agent cares

Provenance is what lets an agent decide whether to trust and cite a page, and JSON-LD is the only unambiguous place to state it. This is Lumar's readiness bar for editorial trust, not Google rich-result validity: Google states Article has no required properties.

Adoption

Web baseline. Standard equipment on the web. Its absence is the exception rather than its presence. For this one in particular, the JSON-LD syntax is everywhere; the article types that carry provenance are niche.

Direction of travel: ► flat, as at 2026-07-28.

JSON-LD is on 41% of pages but Article-type markup on roughly 0.18% (Web Almanac 2024), and no vendor has confirmed that author markup feeds AI citations.

What we check

Absence is never a finding. Every check below runs only when this technology is detected, so a site that has not adopted this is not assessed on it and appears in no report. 4 of these 4 can fail it. In Lumar these appear on each page's own row.

Check	Severity	Raises	On whose authority
Editorial Missing Author	medium	usability	Lumar readiness bar, beyond Google Search: Article structured data (states no required properties), Schema.org author
Supporting documents: Google Search: Article structured data (states no required properties), Schema.org author Lumar readiness bar: no specification requires this. Bad: the Article has no resolvable author (absent, or a nameless author node), so agents can't attribute the content. Fix: add "author": {"@type": "Person", "name": "..."} (an Organization or a plain string also works).
Editorial Missing Publisher	medium	usability	Lumar readiness bar, beyond Google Search: Article structured data (states no required properties), Schema.org author
Supporting documents: Google Search: Article structured data (states no required properties), Schema.org author Lumar readiness bar: no specification requires this. Bad: the Article has no resolvable publisher, so agents can't identify who stands behind the content. Fix: add "publisher": {"@type": "Organization", "name": "..."}.
Editorial Missing Date Published	medium	usability	Lumar readiness bar, beyond Google Search: Article structured data (states no required properties)
Supporting documents: Google Search: Article structured data (states no required properties) Lumar readiness bar: no specification requires this. Bad: the Article has no datePublished, so agents can't judge how current the content is. Fix: add it in ISO 8601, e.g. "datePublished": "2026-07-29".
Editorial Invalid Date	medium	usability	vendor profile: Schema.org author
Supporting documents: Schema.org author Related guidance in Schema.org author. Bad: a datePublished/dateModified value isn't valid ISO 8601, so agents can't parse when the content was published. Fix: use ISO 8601, e.g. "2026-07-29" or "2026-07-29T09:30:00Z".

Examples

Both run through the same checks as a live scan: the first passes, the second is flagged.

correcthtmlexcerpt

<script type="application/ld+json">
      {
        "@context": "https://schema.org",
        "@graph": [
          { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://example.com/trust/correct.html#webpage", "url": "https://example.com/trust/correct.html" },
          {
            "@type": "NewsArticle",
            "@id": "https://example.com/trust/correct.html#article",
            "headline": "How agent-readiness works",
            "author": { "@id": "https://example.com/#/schema/person/ada" },
            "publisher": { "@id": "https://example.com/#organization" },
            "datePublished": "2026-06-01T09:00:00Z",
            "dateModified": "2026-06-15T12:00:00Z"
          },
          { "@type": "Person", "@id": "https://example.com/#/schema/person/ada", "name": "Ada Lovelace", "url": "https://example.com/authors/ada" },
          {
            "@type": "Organization",
            "@id": "https://example.com/#organization",
            "name": "Example",
            "logo": { "@type": "ImageObject", "url": "https://example.com/logo.png" }
          }
        ]
      }
    </script>

present but wronghtmlexcerpt

<script type="application/ld+json">
      {
        "@context": "https://schema.org",
        "@type": "NewsArticle",
        "headline": "How agent-readiness works",
        "datePublished": "yesterday"
      }
    </script>

Specifications

Document	Revision	Kind
Schema.org author	Version 30.1	specification
Google Search: Article structured data (states no required properties)	Living document	vendor profile

Last re-read against the published documents: 2026-10-05.