Person is not a known valid target type for the publisher property.

It’s not just you. If you’ve received this error the odds are pretty good this component of your schema is correct and your validator is mistaken.

Specifically, in this case, the Google Structured Data Tester. After testing this blog, I was puzzled as to why Google was throwing an Error on this property. I checked the documentation on schema.org and as expected, Person is indeed a valid type for the Publisher property.

Specifically, “Values expected to be one of these types: Organization and Person“. Perhaps I was missing context? Nope.

Google’s validator just needs to be updated to be in parity with the official Schema.org specs.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.