HowTo, ItemList and advanced author schema (Pro)
The schema types Pro detects automatically, and the extended Person node for author credibility.
Last updated September 27, 2026
Free outputs FAQ, Article and Speakable schema, plus a basic Person node for the author box. Pro adds two things on top: schema types that are detected rather than declared, and a much fuller author identity.
HowTo and ItemList, detected automatically
A scanner runs on a schedule, examines your content, and identifies posts whose structure is genuinely a set of steps or a genuine list. Where it finds one, the matching HowTo or ItemList schema is emitted.
It reports recommendations rather than silently rewriting your markup, so you can see which posts it considers candidates before the output changes. Detection is structural: a post has to actually read as steps or a list. Prose with the word “steps” in it does not qualify, and that restraint is deliberate, because schema that misdescribes a page is worse than no schema.
The extended Person node
Free establishes who the author is. Pro extends that same node with the fields that make an author verifiable rather than merely named:
sameAs, the author’s profiles elsewhere.knowsAbout, their subject areas.- Credentials and qualifications.
memberOf, organisations and professional bodies.- Awards.
- External identifiers.
- Contact details.
- Publishing principles.
This is E-E-A-T groundwork. It makes a claim about authorship machine-readable and checkable. Fill in only what is true; an unverifiable claim in structured data is worse than an absent one.
Where the controls are
The advanced author fields appear inside the author box screen you already use, and the schema recommendations appear in the schema screen. Pro renders the real inputs where Free shows a Pro marker, so nothing moves.
What this does and does not promise
Schema makes your content and your authorship legible to crawlers and AI systems. It does not promise a ranking, a citation or a rich result. What is in your control is whether the information is present, accurate and readable, and that is what this feature delivers.
Related
The E-E-A-T author box, Article and Speakable schema, schema enabled but no output.