What is rel=“me” and how do you verify your Mastodon profile?
rel="me" is an HTML attribute that says “this link points to another page about the same person.” Put it on a link from your website to your Mastodon profile, add your site’s URL to your Mastodon profile fields, and Mastodon verifies the connection and shows your site with a green check. It’s identity verification with no blue-check subscription: two links that vouch for each other.
How do you verify your Mastodon profile with your website?
Two steps. On your website, add a link to your profile with the attribute: <a rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@you">Mastodon</a>. It can be anywhere in the page, visible or in the head as a <link> tag. Then in Mastodon, go to Edit profile, add your website URL to one of the four profile metadata fields, and save. Mastodon fetches your site, finds the rel="me" link pointing back at your profile, and turns that field green with a checkmark. If it doesn’t verify, the usual culprits are a redirect (verify the exact URL, https and all), the link being injected by JavaScript so Mastodon’s fetcher never sees it, or a proxy blocking Mastodon’s verifier.
What else uses rel="me"?
It’s an IndieWeb building block, so more than you’d think. GitHub adds rel="me" to the website link on your profile, which means your GitHub profile can serve as one side of a verification pair. Keyoxide and other identity tools walk rel="me" graphs to prove account ownership across services. IndieAuth, the IndieWeb sign-in protocol, uses rel="me" links to let you log into services with your own domain as your identity. The pattern is always the same: two pages that each claim the other, forming a loop no impersonator can complete, because they’d need control of both ends.
Does rel="me" help with SEO or AI answers?
Indirectly but increasingly. Search and answer engines build entity graphs: which accounts, sites, and works belong to the same person. Explicit machine-readable claims like rel="me", pointing both directions, are exactly the food that graph wants, alongside consistent names and schema.org sameAs declarations. None of it boosts rankings directly; all of it makes engines more confident about attributing your work to you, which is what gets your name into an AI answer instead of a vague “some developers.”
What’s the easiest way to get this right everywhere?
Pick one canonical page about you, your personal site or a hub page listing your work, and make it the center: it carries rel="me" links out to every profile (Mastodon, GitHub, X, LinkedIn), and every profile links back to it. One loop per service, all through one page. This is exactly how BuiltByBadge builds hubs: every social link on the hub ships with rel="me" by default, and the badge on each of your sites carries rel="me" too, so every project you ship becomes another verified claim that you are you. If you’re doing it by hand, the whole job is one attribute, four profile settings, and five minutes.
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