How do AI tools know who wrote my page?
Only if the page tells them in a form they can read. A byline in the design is text like any other; a machine has to guess that it is a name. Markup that states the author or the organisation behind the page turns that guess into a fact it can repeat when it cites you.
What it actually is
There are a few standard ways to say who is behind a page: an author or publisher in the page's structured data, a named Organization or Person described there, an author line in the page's head, or a link marked as pointing to the author. Each is invisible to a visitor and unambiguous to software. A name printed under the headline is none of these.
Why it matters
An assistant that quotes you wants to say whose words they are, and it is more willing to rely on a source it can attribute. When the author or the business is declared, the attribution is free and certain. When it is only printed on the page, the machine either has to infer it from the layout, or leaves you unnamed, which is the outcome that turns your expertise into an anonymous fact.
What good looks like
Every page states, in markup, the person who wrote it or the organisation that publishes it, with a real name. Articles name their author; the homepage and service pages name the business. The name in the markup matches the one people see, so the two never disagree.
Being honest about it
We do not fail a page for this; it is a warning at most. And we are deliberately strict about what counts: a byline a visitor can see earns nothing here, because this check is about whether a machine can read who you are, not whether a person can. Most sites that pass do so through the organisation markup they already have, which is a perfectly good answer for a business page.
Where most sites go wrong
The usual cause is a blog template that prints the author's name beautifully and declares it nowhere. The subtler one is markup that points to an author or publisher defined elsewhere in the page, when that definition was never actually included, so the reference names nobody.
On the web
State of the Web · November 2026In November 2026, 50% of the sites we could read passed the “Author / publisher is clear” check.
Shopify sites pass it most often, at 76%. Webflow sites pass it least often, at 46%.
On the sites scanned in both October 2026 and November 2026, it went from 53% to 52%.
The month-by-month line counts the sites scanned in each calendar month, so it can differ from the figure above, which uses each site’s latest scan from the last three months.
Goes with
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Sites that pass this are 4 times as likely to pass the “Content usage preferences declared” check too. 6% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 2% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are 3.5 times as likely to pass the “AI bot rules are explicit and intentional” check too. 20% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 6% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are 3 times as likely to pass the “Open Graph tags for sharing” check too. 33% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 12% of the sites that do not.
Not enough history yet.
Based on the sites Bot Appétit has scanned. Most of these sites come from lists we scan for research. Not a random sample of the web.
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