An author entity is a recognisable person to whom a system can attribute content, expertise and a publishing history. A name under an article is not enough for this – many people share the same name, and without connections it is just plain text. You create an entity by giving the author their own page on the website with a professional description, a stated specialisation and a list of their articles, and linking this page in a machine-readable way to the other places where the same person appears. The sameAs property in structured data serves this linking, pointing to professional networks, publication profiles, talks or professional registers. Both models and search engines then join up the scattered traces into a single subject and can assess whether the source is competent. For a company, this is the cheapest way to strengthen the credibility of its content without changing the texts themselves.
See also: Entity Disambiguation, Source consensus, Grounding.
