Author Finder

Where the tool looks for the author

A page can name its writer in six places, and many name them in only one or two. The tool fetches the page's HTML and reads all of them:

• Structured data (JSON-LD). The author field of the page's Article or BlogPosting markup, including authors referenced by @id elsewhere in the graph. Yoast, Rank Math and most CMSs write this for search engines.
• Author meta tags. <meta name="author">, plus the parsely-author, sailthru.author, dc.creator and article:author variants news sites use.
• The "Written by" tag. Yoast adds twitter:label1 "Written by" with the author's display name for link previews on X and Slack.
• The visible byline. rel="author" links, .byline and .author-name classes from common WordPress themes, and short "By Jane Smith" lines inside the article.
• Microdata. Elements marked itemprop="author", used by older themes.
• The author archive link. Links to /author/jane-smith/, the WordPress default, which also gives you the writer's page with every post they have published.

Names in comment threads are skipped, since those belong to readers. Each name is labelled as a full name, a first name only, a username, a team or brand label, or the site's own name, so you can tell a person from a byline that says "Editorial Team".

What 364 blog articles actually show

To check the tool against real pages, we ran it on 400 blog articles from 400 different sites, picked at random from the pages MentionAgent's prospecting added in the 120 days to 5 October 2026. These are the kinds of posts people pitch for links and guest posts: small business blogs, SaaS blogs, niche publishers. 364 could be read; the other 36 blocked the request or no longer existed.

So a little over half of blog articles name a real person, and two in five give you no person to address a pitch to. The 55 team labels were things like "Editorial Team", "Admin" and "The [Brand] Team". The first-name-only group is still useful: on a small blog, first@domain is the most common address format by a wide margin.

Most author names are in the code, not the byline

Of the 200 articles that named a person, this is where the name appeared. Most named them in more than one place, so the shares add up to more than 100%:

The finding that matters for anyone searching by eye: 84 of the 200 named authors (42%) appeared only in metadata, with no byline markup or author link the tool recognised. Some of those pages print the name in a format we do not parse, but many print no byline at all. 51 of the 200 named their author in exactly one place, and for 35 of those that one place was the JSON-LD. If you read only the visible page, you miss a large share of the authors who are there.

How to find who wrote an article by hand

If the tool cannot read a page, or you want to check its answer, these steps cover the same ground:

1. Read the byline and the end of the post. Look under the headline, beside the date, and in an author box after the last paragraph.
2. View the page source. Press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) and search for author. Check the "author" entry in any application/ld+json block and the name="author" meta tag.
3. Follow the author link. On WordPress sites, /author/ pages list every post by that writer and often carry a bio with social links.
4. Check the about or team page. On a small blog with no byline, the owner named on the about page usually wrote the post.
5. Look at an older copy. The Wayback Machine sometimes shows a byline a redesign removed.
6. Search the headline. Put the exact title in quotes in a search engine. Syndicated copies and the writer's own portfolio often credit them.

When the page names no one

Two in five of the articles we tested gave you no person to write to: no author at all, a team label, a username or something unclear. For those, do not guess a person. Write to the site instead:

• Use the published contact. Check the contact, about and "write for us" pages. Our guide on how to find someone's email address lists where these usually sit.
• Pick the right shared inbox. On small sites, hello@, contact@ and editor@ reach a person more often than support@. The email permutator lists these after the name-based guesses.
• Address the role, not a made-up name. "Hi there" or "Hi [Site] team" reads better than a guessed first name that turns out to be wrong.

From the author's name to their inbox

A name on its own does not get a pitch delivered. For each person the tool finds, the "Guess their email" button opens our email permutator with the name and domain filled in, ordered by how often each format appears on real blog contacts. Then:

• Check for a published address first. The tool lists any mailto address on the article; 28% of the pages we tested had one, though many were the site's general inbox. The author archive page and linked profiles are the next places to look, and there is a separate guide to finding emails on social media.
• Verify before you send. A wrong guess is a hard bounce. Run the domain through the email verifier, keep an eye on your bounce rate, and use one of these email finders when sending at volume.
• Write to the article you read. Mention the post by name and what you would add to it. Our outreach email templates and guest post pitch templates show the shape, and the cold email grader scores a draft before it goes out.

If you are doing this for a list of articles rather than one, our guide to blogger outreach tools compares the software that finds the contact for each site in bulk.

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