Google picks the site name it shows above your blog's results by itself. It reads your home page, and the strongest preference you can state there is the name in WebSite structured data. It also looks at og:site_name, the <title>, headings and other text on the home page, according to Google's site names documentation (last updated 10 December 2025). When Google shows the wrong name, the fix is to make those signals agree, add fallbacks in alternateName, and get the home page recrawled.
Two cases have no markup fix. Google only supports site names for a domain or subdomain, so a blog at example.com/blog can't get a name of its own. And Google can still decline a name it finds generic or already used by another site. The rest of this post covers how to see what your home page actually sends, what four platforms put there by default, and the fix for each wrong name you might be seeing.
The markup Google asks for
Google wants one WebSite object on the root URL of the domain or subdomain, with a name and the canonical home page url. It doesn't need to be on every page. alternateName is optional and takes a list in order of preference. Google's documentation suggests ending that list with your domain in lowercase, because it will strongly consider that as a backup when your preferred name isn't picked.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Field Notes",
"alternateName": ["Field Notes Blog", "fieldnotes.dev"],
"url": "https://fieldnotes.dev/"
}
</script>
If your platform already prints a WebSite block, change that block instead of pasting a second one into a custom head field. Google asks you to keep the site name properties in the same node and to avoid an additional WebSite block on the home page. The Rich Results Test doesn't cover site names, so check the syntax with the Schema Markup Validator instead.
This post is only about the home page, not the markup on individual posts.
Check what your home page sends to Googlebot
Viewing the source in your browser isn't always enough. On 16 October 2026 I requested the home pages of two Substack publications, on.substack.com and lennysnewsletter.com, twice each. With a Chrome user agent, the HTML had no JSON-LD at all. With Googlebot's user agent, the response was several times larger and contained a WebSite block with the publication name. Neither response had og:site_name.
So check the version Google receives. The URL Inspection tool in Search Console shows the HTML Google crawled; Google's help page for the tool explains the live test. For a quick look from a terminal, this fetches the home page with a Googlebot user agent and prints the title, og:site_name and the start of any WebSite block. The tr step flattens the HTML so JSON-LD spread over several lines still matches.
curl -sL -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" https://example.com/ \
| tr -s '\n\t ' ' ' \
| grep -oE '<title[^>]*>[^<]*|og:site_name"[^>]*|"@type" ?: ?"WebSite"[^}]{0,200}'
Some hosts answer scripted requests with a bot challenge instead of the page. Bear Blog and Medium returned Cloudflare challenge pages to my requests, and one Hashnode blog returned a Vercel security checkpoint. URL Inspection is the reliable check in that case.
What four platforms put on a blog's home page
I checked live home pages on 16 October 2026. Each row describes what the sites I sampled sent, which is the platform default unless the owner changed it.
| Platform | Sites checked | Home page markup | Where to change the name |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ghost |
demo.ghost.io, platformer.news
|
WebSite with the site title as name, plus matching og:site_name
|
The site title. No alternateName in the default output. |
| Substack |
on.substack.com, lennysnewsletter.com
|
WebSite with the publication name, only in the Googlebot response. Title reads "Name |
Substack". No og:site_name. |
| Hashnode |
townhall.hashnode.com, blog.greenroots.info
|
Blog, not WebSite, with the full blog title as name; the same text in og:site_name and <title>
|
The blog title. |
| WordPress |
yoast.com, longreads.com, themeshaper.com, ma.tt
|
yoast.com and longreads.com had a WebSite node. ThemeShaper and ma.tt had og:site_name but no WebSite node. WordPress core doesn't print JSON-LD itself, so the node depends on a plugin or theme. |
With Yoast SEO: Settings, then Site basics, which has Website name and Alternate website name fields. |
Hashnode's choice of Blog is a valid schema.org type, but Google's guide only describes WebSite, and it doesn't say whether a Blog node's name is read as a site name preference. On those blogs the title and og:site_name carry the same text, so the signals at least agree. Long titles like "GreenRoots Blog - A Blog by Tapas Adhikary" are what Google warns may be truncated on some devices.
Match the wrong name to its cause
The name Google shows usually tells you which rule you've run into.
Google shows your domain instead of a name
This is Google's fallback when it isn't confident in the name you gave. Confirm there is a WebSite block on the root URL and that it validates. Then make the visible home page agree with it: if the structured data says "Field Notes" and the title says "Home | My Blog", you're sending two answers. Add a shorter or more specific alternateName. A name that describes a category rather than a publication, like "Tech Blog", is one Google says it is unlikely to pick.
Google still shows the old name after a rename
The site name comes from the home page, so nothing changes until Google recrawls it. Request indexing for the home page in URL Inspection. Google's guide says crawling can take from several days to several weeks, and internal pages pick up the new name only after they are recrawled too. If you changed domains at the same time, the redirects and the Change of Address tool have to be done first.
A subdomain blog shows your main site's name
Google says that when a subdomain's home page has no structured data, the domain-level site name may be used as a fallback. If blog.example.com should carry its own name, its root URL needs its own WebSite block. If showing the company name is fine with you, there is nothing to fix.
A blog at /blog shows the main site's name
This is the subdirectory rule, and markup won't change it. Google's own example marks https://example.com/news as unsupported. My own product blog is in that position: it lives under /blog on the main domain, its home page prints a valid WebSite block with its own name, and under Google's rules that block can't give it a name separate from the one Google uses for the domain. For most company blogs that's the right result. If a separate name matters more than sharing the main domain, the blog has to move to a subdomain.
The name differs between www and the apex, or http and https
Google asks for the same structured data on every duplicate home page, and when a variant redirects, it uses the redirect target. If every variant of your address redirects to one home page, there is nothing to align. A missing redirect leaves two home pages that each need the same markup. Pick one and redirect the other.
Google shows an acronym or a different form of your name
Google says it may choose an acronym when the site is better known by one, and it generally won't give the same name to two sites that are global in nature. List the forms you're willing to accept in alternateName, most preferred first. As a last resort, Google's documentation says you can set the lowercase domain itself as name, and it will generally select that.
I checked all of this while wiring the WebSite block into the themes on JustBlogged. The Substack result surprised me the most... the markup only shows up when you ask as Googlebot, so a view-source check says it isn't there
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