Google adds creator and author to VideoObject markup, and names the four interactionStatistic types it supports

Anyone publishing video pages has, until this week, been guessing at two questions Google's VideoObject documentation did not answer: whether Google reads a creator property on the video, and which interactionStatistic types Google actually treats as valid. Google updated the page on 2026-09-24 and answered both.

The Search Central changelog for that day names one change to the VideoObject structured data documentation: "Added the creator property (noting support for author) and updated interactionStatistic to document supported interaction types". Google says the reason was "to document support for the creator and author properties, and clarify supported interaction types for interactionStatistic in VideoObject structured data". Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable surfaced the update at 11:12 Pacific the same morning.

The creator property

creator (with author supported as an alternative) sits alongside contentUrl, description, duration, embedUrl, interactionStatistic and the other recommended VideoObject properties. Google's own rule for it, from the docs: "If a person or organization is specified, you must provide either name or alternateName." Either a Person or an Organization value works, and there is no requirement that the creator be a natural person.

For a publisher whose video pages already mark up author elsewhere on the page, the change is small: mirror the value inside the VideoObject node so Google reads it as the video's creator rather than the article's. For a site that has no author markup on video pages today, this is the point to add one.

The four interactionStatistic types

The docs now list the four interactionType values Google supports inside interactionStatistic: WatchAction for "the number of times the video has been watched", LikeAction for "the number of likes or upvotes", CommentAction for "the number of comments" and ShareAction for "the number of reshares". userInteractionCount has to be an Integer.

The older interactionCount property still works. Google's docs note: "Starting October 2019, we changed our documentation to recommend interactionStatistic instead of interactionCount. While we continue to support interactionCount, we recommend interactionStatistic moving forward." The current update leaves both properties supported and adds a documented list of interaction types that were previously implied.

A documentation change, read carefully

Google made a documentation change. The company did not claim in the update that creator improves rankings, that videos without it will lose visibility, or that any of the four interactionStatistic types now feed a scoring signal. The claim in the update is narrower: these properties are supported and documented, so a site adding them can expect Google to parse them without ignoring the value or throwing a rich-results warning.

The consequence for a team publishing video pages is a documentation task rather than a rankings task: add creator to the VideoObject JSON-LD in the site's video-page template, use one of the four named interactionType values in each interactionStatistic entry, and put an Integer in userInteractionCount. A markup that already used other interaction types now has a documented list to check against.

Source

• Video (VideoObject, Clip, BroadcastEvent) structured data, Google Search Central, updated 2026-09-24
• Google Video Schema Gets Creator Property & Updated interactionStatistic, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable, 2026-09-24