probeo

Which Open Graph tags does an article need?

og:article:published_time page

The issue

A page that calls itself an article in Open Graph but gives no publication date or author leaves both out of the metadata that platforms and other readers of the page use. A dated, attributed article reads as one; an undated, anonymous one gives a reader less reason to trust it, and nothing on the page shows the gap.

The cause is usually a template that sets og:type to article and fills only the general tags: title, description, image and URL.

Scope

Each page whose og:type is exactly article is checked, among pages that declare at least one og: property. Pages of any other type aren’t checked for these tags. Probeo checks that each tag is present, not what it contains.

How to check you have it

  • In probeo: the page reports Missing article:published_time for article type or Missing article:author for article type, as a warning. They are stored as og:article:published_time and og:article:author.
  • By hand: view the page source, confirm og:type is article, and search the <head> for article:published_time and article:author.
  • With a tool: Facebook’s Sharing Debugger lists the properties it read for the URL.

The fix

Add article:published_time and article:author to every page that declares og:type as article.

The Open Graph protocol defines the published time as an ISO 8601 date and time, and the author as a profile: a URL for the author’s page. article:modified_time can sit alongside it when the article has been updated.

<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2026-03-02T09:00:00-05:00">
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2026-09-18T14:30:00-04:00">
<meta property="article:author" content="https://example.com/authors/dana-reyes/">

Done when: every article page carries both tags with true values, and the check above comes back clean.

Do not

  • Do not set og:type to article on pages that aren’t articles, such as product or category pages.
  • Do not use the date the page was generated as the published time.
  • Do not leave the author tag in a template for pages that have no author.

FAQ

Should article:author be a name or a URL?

The Open Graph protocol defines it as a profile, which in practice is a URL for the author’s page. Probeo checks only that the tag is present.

Does this replace the date and author in structured data?

No. JSON-LD’s datePublished and author are read by search engines; the Open Graph tags are read by sharing platforms and other consumers of Open Graph. A page can carry both, and they should agree.

What if the page isn’t really an article?

Then the fix is og:type, not these tags. website is the general type for a page that isn’t an article; probeo doesn’t check article tags on it.

Which product detects this

Probeo checks this on every page of your site as part of Site Clarity. This page explains one instance; the product tells you every page that has it.