Section 04 of 06
AI content, provenance and authorship on shared links
A shared link used to raise one question: does the preview look right? It now raises a second one: who made this, and was it a person? Feeds carry a growing share of generated images and text, platforms label some of it, and readers look for signs that someone is accountable for what they are reading.
The guides in this section apply the same plugin-neutral method as the rest of the handbook to that second question. They cover what publishers can control on their own pages: provenance data on images, authorship tags in the page head, byline structured data, and an honest disclosure policy, plus how platforms decide when to add a label.
Every other section is listed guide by guide in the numbered index on the homepage.
The guides in this section
- AI-generated content in social feeds: what publishers should doHow AI-generated images and text change what happens when your posts are shared, and the practical steps publishers can take: disclosure, provenance, bylines.4 min read
- Content Credentials on shared images: what survives a shareWhat C2PA Content Credentials are, why WordPress image sizes and social uploads often strip them, and how to keep provenance on the images you share.4 min read
- Authorship tags for shared links: author, article:author and fediverse:creatorAdd authorship signals to link previews: the author meta tag, article:author, twitter:creator and fediverse:creator, with WordPress code and testing steps.3 min read
- Byline schema in WordPress: marking up a human authorMark up article authors with schema.org Person data in WordPress: the fields search engines read, author pages, sameAs profiles and common mistakes.4 min read
- How platforms label AI content, and what triggers the labelHow major platforms decide to label AI-generated or altered media: creator disclosure, provenance metadata, detection, and how publishers avoid mistakes.4 min read
How this section connects to the rest of the handbook
Everything here builds on link previews. Authorship tags sit beside the Open Graph tags you already output, provenance data lives in the same image your og:image tag names, and the byline markup follows the one-source rule that prevents duplicate tags. If your previews are not yet reliable, fix them first with the Open Graph section.
What we do not cover
We do not review AI writing tools or detectors, and we do not recommend any product. Detection of generated text is unreliable, so the guides focus on signals a publisher can state and stand behind rather than on tools that guess.
Questions
What is content provenance?
A record of where a piece of media came from and how it was changed, such as a signed C2PA manifest inside an image file.
Can I prove my article was written by a person?
Not with certainty. You can make a person accountable: a named byline, an author page, author tags, byline schema and a disclosure policy.
Do share plugins handle any of this?
Rarely. Author tags and byline schema usually come from an SEO plugin or theme code; provenance data comes from your image tools.
Hannah Voss, Editor. Checks every guide against a working WordPress install and the networks' current documentation. Last reviewed September 2026.