Your qualifications are real. They are listed on your About page, your LinkedIn profile, your practice registration, and the certificates on your wall. But when a search engine or AI system processes your website, it reads your HTML — and in plain HTML, a heading that says “Chartered Physiotherapist” is just text. It carries no more semantic weight than a heading that says “Chocolate Cake Recipe”.
Structured data changes that. And for professionals with real credentials, one specific part of structured data matters more than almost anything else: identity schema.
What identity schema actually is
Schema.org is a shared vocabulary for structured data, founded and maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex. When you add structured data to your website, you are attaching machine-readable labels to your content — telling systems not just what words appear on the page, but what those words mean.
Identity schema refers to two schema.org types in particular: Person and Organization. These types describe who you are — not what you sell, not your opening hours, but your identity as an entity in the world. Used correctly, they allow search engines and AI systems to build a coherent picture of you: your name, your role, your areas of expertise, the organisations that have recognised your qualifications, and the online profiles that confirm you are who you say you are.
A basic Person node in JSON-LD looks like this:
{
"@type": "Person",
"@id": "https://example.com/#/schema/person",
"name": "Jane Smith",
"jobTitle": "Chartered Physiotherapist",
"url": "https://example.com",
"sameAs": [
"https://www.linkedin.com/in/janesmith",
"https://www.exampleclinic.co.uk/team/jane-smith"
],
"knowsAbout": ["Physiotherapy", "Sports Rehabilitation", "Musculoskeletal Assessment"]
}That sameAs array is important. Each URL is a cross-reference — a pointer to an external profile that confirms this entity is real, consistent, and recognised elsewhere. It is how a search engine connects the Jane Smith on your website to the Jane Smith on the clinic’s team page and the Jane Smith on LinkedIn. Without it, you are an unverified string of text.
One detail that often goes wrong: a sameAs URL should point to a page that actually describes you — your professional body profile, your author page, your LinkedIn account. A regulator’s website does not belong there; the front page of a register confirms nothing about you specifically. The fact that your registration appears on the HCPC register is expressed through hasCredential instead — which is the next section.
The hasCredential property: what it does
Basic Person schema handles identity. hasCredential handles proof.
hasCredential is a schema.org property that attaches one or more EducationalOccupationalCredential objects to a Person or Organisation node. Each credential object can carry:
- The name of the credential (e.g., “MCSP — Member of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy”)
- The issuing organisation via
recognizedBy— itself anOrganizationnode with a name and URL - Issue and expiry dates
- A
credentialCategory(degree, certificate, licence, badge) - A URL to the certificate or the register entry
A credential in structured data looks like this:
{
"@type": "EducationalOccupationalCredential",
"name": "MCSP",
"credentialCategory": "certification",
"recognizedBy": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Chartered Society of Physiotherapy",
"url": "https://www.csp.org.uk"
},
"validFrom": "2019-01-01",
"validUntil": "2027-12-31"
}This is not decoration. It is a machine-readable statement that says: this person holds this credential, it was issued by this organisation, and it is current. That is a fundamentally different signal from a paragraph of text that says “Jane has been a member of the CSP since 2019.”
The vocabulary is still developing. In schema.org 30.0, released on 19 March 2026, hasCredential gained a broader parent type — EducationalOccupationalCredential is now a subtype of the general Credential type. Both are valid, and the more specific type remains the right choice for professional qualifications.
How this connects to E-E-A-T
Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines assess content against a framework called E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are the criteria Google’s human raters use to judge whether content from a particular source is worth ranking well. Google is explicit that the framework is not itself a ranking factor: “While E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor,” it writes, “using a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T is useful.” We have covered what E-E-A-T means in practice separately.
Google’s guidance on helpful content puts the question directly: does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, “such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?” What structured data adds is a machine-readable layer on top of that human-readable content. Instead of requiring Google to interpret your About page text and infer that “HCPC registered” means you hold a recognised professional qualification, schema markup states it directly in a vocabulary that systems can process without ambiguity.
Google has not published documentation that explicitly lists hasCredential as a processed ranking signal. What is clear is that entity resolution — the process by which search engines confirm that you are who you claim to be — relies heavily on structured data. The more completely your identity is described in schema, and the more consistently that description matches your external profiles, the more confidently a system can verify your expertise in a given domain.
Identity schema and AI search
The shift toward AI-generated answers in search makes entity clarity more important, not less. When ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, or Bing Copilot generates an answer about a topic, it draws on sources it has indexed. The question of which sources to cite — and how to describe the people behind them — depends on how clearly those sources are structured.
Structured data is strikingly common among the pages AI systems cite. SE Ranking reported on 19 January 2026 that around 65% of pages cited by Google’s AI Mode and 71% of pages cited by ChatGPT contain structured data. The most common types, though, were not content-descriptive but structural — BreadcrumbList, WebSite, Organization, and WebPage — which describes the kind of sites that get cited more than it describes what the markup does for them.
And presence is not cause. Ahrefs published a direct test on 11 May 2026: 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD between August 2025 and March 2026, compared against 4,000 control pages that did not. Citations in AI Overviews fell 4.6%, AI Mode rose 2.4%, and ChatGPT rose 2.2% — the latter two small enough to be indistinguishable from noise. Adding schema produced no meaningful uplift on any platform.
The decisive limitation is which pages Ahrefs measured: every one of them already had at least 100 AI Overview citations before schema was added. So the study shows that structured data does not make already well-cited pages more cited. It says nothing about the problem identity schema actually solves — allowing a system to establish who you are and what you are qualified to speak about. That is entity resolution, not citation volume. Anyone selling schema as a button you press for more AI mentions is selling something this study does not support.
For a physiotherapist writing about knee rehabilitation, the difference between a generic webpage and a page whose author is described as a Person node with HCPC registration, CSP membership, and knowsAbout fields including “Knee Rehabilitation” is the difference between an anonymous piece of content and a verifiable expert source. Whether a given AI system uses that structured data at the point of answer generation or only during indexing varies by platform, and no major AI provider has fully documented their pipeline. But the direction of travel is clear: entity clarity is increasingly valuable.
The gap the major SEO plugins leave
Most WordPress sites that use structured data at all do so through one of the major SEO plugins: Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, or The SEO Framework. These are genuinely excellent tools. They handle Article schema on posts, Organisation and Person nodes for site-wide identity, breadcrumbs, sitemaps, and a great deal more.
What none of them output, in their standard interfaces, is hasCredential.
Yoast’s Person schema piece outputs name, description, URL, image, sameAs, and pronouns. Rank Math’s Person type offers headline, description, email, address, gender, job title, and — in the Pro version — sameAs. Neither provides a UI for credentials. You cannot open the settings and add a credential issuer, an expiry date, and a badge URL. You can add this via custom code and filters, but for most professionals managing their own WordPress site, that is not a realistic option.
This is not a criticism of those plugins — credentials are a niche requirement, and they are built for a general audience. It is simply an accurate description of where professional identity schema currently sits: within reach of what the spec defines, but outside the scope of what general-purpose tools provide.
Who this matters for
Identity schema in general is relevant to any website with an author or a business identity. hasCredential specifically matters for professionals whose qualifications are material to why clients should trust them.
That includes physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and other regulated healthcare providers whose registration status is a legal and professional requirement. It includes solicitors, accountants, architects, and engineers who hold designatory letters that carry real meaning — MCSP, MRICS, ACCA, ARB — and whose clients make decisions partly on the basis of those letters. It includes consultants, coaches, and agency owners who hold certifications that signal competence: Google certifications, ISO accreditations, industry body memberships.
For all of these people, credentials exist and are verifiable. The question is whether they are in a format that machines can read. Right now, for most professional websites, they are not.
The Article → Person connection
One further piece worth understanding: Article schema.
When you publish a blog post or an article, schema.org supports an Article type that includes an author property. That author property can reference your Person node — not by repeating all the data, but by pointing to its @id. This creates a graph relationship: this article was written by this person, who holds these credentials, and is an expert in these topics.
The practical effect is that every piece of content you publish can be linked back to a verified, credentialed author identity — not just a byline, but a machine-readable claim about who wrote it and why they are qualified to write it. For a physiotherapist publishing a guide to rehabilitation exercises, or a solicitor explaining a change in employment law, that connection is the difference between content attributed to a name and content attributed to an entity whose expertise is documented and verifiable.
What to do next
If you are a professional with real credentials and a WordPress site, there are two practical steps worth taking.
The first is to audit what structured data your site currently outputs. Many sites have incomplete or conflicting schema — a Yoast Person node with a name and description but no sameAs, no credentials, and no connection to the articles the author has written. Understanding what you have is the foundation for knowing what to add. Schema Check shows what is actually on a single page, and our Schema Audit & Structured Data Report covers the whole site: a full review of your existing markup, what is missing, what conflicts, and what to prioritise.
The second is to output hasCredential properly. If you run WordPress and want a plugin that handles the full Person and Organisation identity layer — credentials, expiry tracking, sameAs, knowsAbout, Article linking, and compatibility with whatever SEO plugin you already use — that is what Schema Identity does. It is free, requires no build tools, and works alongside Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, and The SEO Framework without conflict.
Your credentials are real. Putting them in a format machines can read is a straightforward technical step. It is one that the major SEO plugins have not taken on — which is why it is worth taking yourself.