What is structured data?

Structured data is code added to a page that describes its content in a standard vocabulary, so machines can read facts without guessing: this page is a product, it costs $49, it has these reviews. Most structured data on the web uses the schema.org vocabulary, and Google uses it to understand pages and to show rich results.

What formats does structured data use?

Google supports three: JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa. Google recommends JSON-LD because it sits in one script block and is the easiest to add and maintain at scale.

What does structured data do for SEO?

• Makes a page eligible for rich results such as product prices, review stars, recipes, events and breadcrumbs.
• Helps Google understand what the page is about and which entity it describes.
• Is not a ranking factor by itself, and eligibility is not a guarantee: Google decides whether to show a rich result.

Rich result types change. In 2023 Google limited FAQ rich results to well-known government and health sites and stopped showing HowTo rich results. The markup can still describe the page, but those visual results are mostly gone.

What are the rules?

• Mark up only what the visitor can see on the page.
• Don’t mark up fake or misleading content, such as reviews you wrote yourself.
• Fill in the required properties for the result type you want.

Breaking the structured data policies can lead to a manual action that removes rich results for the site.

Example

A recipe page marked up with cooking time, calories and rating can appear in search with those details under the title, which can lift CTR. Test your markup with the schema checker or Google’s Rich Results Test.