Article does not declare its author or publication date
This page presents itself as an article but declares no the value in its markup.
Why it matters
This page presents itself as an article but declares no the value in its markup. Assistants that cite a source prefer material they can attribute and date, and a search result for a how-to or announcement is far weaker without a visible date — readers assume undated content is stale. Both are machine-readable fields, so adding them is markup work rather than a rewrite.
How ShipReady detects it
Search-engine basics, deliberately shallow. Lighthouse does SEO auditing thoroughly, for free, from Google, built into every browser. This module does not try to compete with that and should never grow to. It exists so a ShipReady report is not conspicuously silent on the subject, and it covers exactly the things a founder is likely to have got wrong without knowing — chiefly a `noindex` left over from staging, which makes a site invisible to search entirely. Every rule reads only the page HTML and response headers already fetched by PageContext. The module issues **no HTTP requests of its own**, which is why it can be this cheap: it is pure analysis of bytes the scan already has. Deliberately NOT covered: keyword analysis, backlinks, content quality, Core Web Vitals, and anything else that needs crawling or a second data source. Also not duplicated here: title, description, og:title, robots.txt, sitemap.xml and custom 404, all of which the readiness check already reports.
Detection is deterministic. ShipReady reports this only when it observes the condition directly, and prefers to miss a real problem over inventing one. Rule version 1.3.0.
How to fix it
This is the prompt ShipReady puts in your report — written to be pasted straight into Cursor, Claude Code, or whichever assistant built the app.
This page presents itself as an article (via og:type=article or a schema.org Article type) but declares no author or publication date. Add the missing field(s) as machine-readable markup, not just visible text: in JSON-LD set "author": {{"@type": "Person", "name": "..."}} and "datePublished": "2026-01-31" (ISO 8601) inside the Article object; or add <meta property="article:published_time" content="..."> and <meta property="article:author" content="...">, plus a visible <time datetime="..."> in the byline so readers see it too. Also set "dateModified" when you update a post — an article that is clearly maintained is more likely to be cited than one that looks abandoned.Frequently asked questions
- What does "Article does not declare its author or publication date" mean?
- This page presents itself as an article but declares no the value in its markup.
- How serious is it?
- ShipReady rates this low. Worth fixing. Small individually, and they accumulate.
- How do I fix it?
- Paste the fix prompt on this page into Cursor, Claude Code or your AI editor. It is the same prompt ShipReady puts in your report.
- Can I check my own site?
- Yes — ShipReady scans up to ten pages of any public site for free and reports this alongside every other check. The free report lists every issue it finds and shows full evidence and a fix prompt for the critical and high-severity ones; medium and low findings are counted and unlock on Pro.
Related checks
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