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Identify a personal site’s publisher

Set Person in search metadata without changing article authors

Use this guide for a personal blog that you publish yourself. It changes the publisher recorded in structured data, the machine-readable description supplied to search engines. It does not change the author shown on an article or the site’s visible title. The publisher settings are available in v2.1.0 and later.

Edit the publisher

Open _config.yml in your repository and edit its existing publisher mapping. If none exists, add this section once, replacing the example name with yours:

publisher:
  type: Person
  name: Jane Doe

Keep Person with that exact capitalization and preserve unrelated settings. If your existing publisher has a logo, that field is ignored for a person; you do not need to upload an organization logo for this task.

For a person’s photograph, the theme can use the site author’s avatar. If you need a different existing image, set publisher.image in the same mapping to its uploaded path or full URL. Keep publisher.url only if you want a publisher website different from the site’s home page. Use the field reference for defaults, image fallbacks and organization settings.

Publish and inspect the result

Commit to the publishing branch, wait for Actions to succeed and open the published home page and a post. For a local preview, restart Jekyll after editing _config.yml.

View the page’s HTML source and find the application/ld+json script describing the website or article. Inside its publisher object, check that @type is Person and name matches your publisher name. Check its url and any image URL too, including the repository path when your site uses baseurl.

The article’s author should still be its original author. A publisher identifies who publishes the site; changing it does not rewrite guest-author settings. Structured data does not guarantee a particular search result or preview.

If the publisher still says Organization, check the capitalization, duplicate publisher sections and the latest published commit. Check your theme version and local head/layout overrides if expected metadata is missing; an older local copy can override the installed theme. Use publishing checks for old output and YAML checks for a failed build.

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