Google said it has recently added the author.url property to the Article structured data documentation. Google said this "url property helps Google disambiguate the correct author of the article." But it seems Google added a number of author based properties to the document recently, not just author.url.
If you compare the document from June or so to the current one, you can see Google added added a number of author based properties to the Non-AMP recommended properties.
Here are the ones added:
- author: The author of the article. If there are multiple authors, specify them in an array
- author.name: The name of the author.
- author.url: A link to a web page that uniquely identifies the author of the article. For example, the author's social media page, an about me page, or a bio page.
You can see the article structured data help document over here.
By the way, this is in Yoast:
So for everyone tweeting about the author URL schema property, we added that in Yoast SEO 16.3, which we released on May 18th.
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) August 9, 2021
Took Google a while to figure out how useful it was, and now they recommend it to everyone 🤷🏻♂️😉 pic.twitter.com/s9EFegsijU
Forum discussion at Twitter.
