What Google Knows About Your Credentials (and What It Doesn't)

When Google encounters a page about endometriosis treatment options or NaProTechnology outcomes, it doesn't just evaluate the content. It tries to determine who wrote it and whether that person has the medical authority to be saying these things. Google calls this dimension E-E-A-T -- experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. For health content specifically, Google applies stricter evaluation criteria because the information directly affects people's wellbeing.

The way Google reads authorship isn't by scanning a headshot or reading a bio paragraph the way a patient would. It reads structured data -- machine-readable code embedded in the page that explicitly states who the author is, what their credentials are, what institutions they are affiliated with, and where else they appear on the web.

How Google reads credentials

Google looks for a specific set of signals when evaluating a medical author. Person schema markup is the primary mechanism -- a block of structured data (JSON-LD) that identifies the author by name, credential, medical specialty, and type of practice. This is the same format Google uses to generate knowledge panels and rich results for physicians.

Beyond the page itself, Google looks for entity consistency across the web. Does this physician appear on Healthgrades, Doximity, or NPI registries under the same name and credentials? Are there published articles in PubMed or medical journals attributed to this person? Do directory profiles link back to this website? Each of these signals reinforces the idea that this is a real, credentialed practitioner -- not an anonymous content farm.

Google also evaluates institutional affiliation. A physician connected to a recognized medical institution, professional organization, or academic publisher carries more weight than an unaffiliated author. For RRM and NaPro practitioners, this means IIRRM membership, medical school appointments, hospital affiliations, and published research in journals like the Linacre Quarterly or the Journal of Restorative Reproductive Medicine all contribute to the author entity that Google is building internally.

What most practice sites actually provide

A typical practice website has an About page with the physician's name, a headshot, a paragraph about their background, and maybe a list of credentials in plain text. This is useful for patients who land on the page. It's nearly invisible to Google's structured data systems.

Plain text on an About page doesn't tell Google that "MD" is a medical degree, that "FACOG" is a board certification, or that the person holding these credentials is the author of the clinical content on the rest of the site. There's no connection between the person described on the About page and the treatment pages elsewhere on the site. No linked publications. No connection to directory profiles. No structured indication that this is a physician's website rather than a health information aggregator.

The credentials exist. The gap is in how they are communicated.

This is a structural gap, not a knowledge gap

Physicians aren't expected to know about JSON-LD markup or schema.org vocabulary. This is web infrastructure, not medicine. The issue is that most website platforms and builders don't surface these options either. A practitioner building a site on a standard template will end up with a clean, professional-looking site that communicates almost nothing to Google's structured data systems. The site works for human visitors. It's opaque to machines.

This isn't a reflection of the practitioner's technical ability or the quality of their current site. It's a gap in what the tools provide by default. The structured identity layer that Google uses to evaluate medical authority simply isn't part of the standard website setup process.

What a well-configured author entity looks like

A properly configured physician website includes a Person schema block that declares the author's name, medical credentials, specialty, affiliated organizations, and practice location. It includes sameAs links -- references to the same person's profiles on Healthgrades, Doximity, NPI registries, institutional faculty pages, and research databases. These links tell Google that the person on this website is the same entity that appears across these verified sources.

It also includes publication references where applicable -- connections to published research that reinforce the author's expertise on the specific topics covered by the site. For a NaPro surgeon who has published outcomes data, this is a direct signal that their clinical content is backed by original research.

When all of these signals are present, Google can build a confident author entity. The result is that content on that site carries more weight in health search results, and AI search systems -- which rely heavily on author verification -- are more likely to cite that practitioner by name.

A high-impact, low-effort improvement

Making credentials machine-readable is one of the most effective changes a practice website can make for search visibility. It doesn't require rewriting content, redesigning the site, or changing platforms. It requires adding structured data that already reflects the truth -- credentials the practitioner already holds, affiliations that already exist, publications that have already been written. The information is there. It just needs to be expressed in the format search systems can read.

For practitioners in specialized fields like restorative reproductive medicine, where the credentials are strong but the web presence is often modest, this is especially impactful. The gap between what a practitioner has accomplished and what Google knows about those accomplishments is usually wide. Closing it is straightforward, and the effect on search visibility -- both traditional and AI-driven -- is immediate.