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What is structured data?

By Jason Burns, Founder of HurcuLeads · Stuff Doer at Adolicious · Updated

Structured data is machine-readable metadata added to a web page — typically as JSON-LD in the head — that describes the page's content using a shared vocabulary (schema.org) so search engines and answer engines can understand what the page is about beyond raw text.

Google's structured-data introduction describes three supported formats — JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa — and recommends JSON-LD. JSON-LD lives in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block, keeping metadata separate from visible HTML and easy to maintain.

Common types cover most publishers: Article, Product, FAQPage, QAPage, Organization, Person, BreadcrumbList, Event, Recipe. Each type has required and recommended properties documented at schema.org and in Google's search-appearance guides.

Structured data unlocks two things: eligibility for rich results in classic Search, and a cleaner attribution signal for answer engines. Neither is guaranteed by markup alone — Google's guidelines require the markup to reflect content actually on the page.

Validate every deployment with the Rich Results Test. A failed test is often silent — the page still loads for humans while carrying broken markup.

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Related questions people ask next

  • What is JSON-LD?

    JSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data) is a W3C-standardized JSON syntax for encoding linked data — it lets a web page declare structured metadata inline using vocabularies like schema.org, and it is Google's recommended structured-data format.

  • Does schema.org markup affect AI citations?

    Schema.org markup affects AI citations indirectly but reliably — it collapses the model's attribution problem by making the author, publisher, and answer text machine-readable, and it is the primary signal Google uses to render both classic rich results and the source strip in AI Overviews.

  • What is QAPage schema and when should I use it?

    QAPage is a schema.org page type for a page whose primary content is a single user-submitted question with one or more community-submitted answers — use it when the visible page matches that shape, and use FAQPage instead when a single author is publishing an official answer.

  • Do rich results affect AI Overviews?

    Rich results and AI Overviews draw on the same underlying signals — crawlable HTML, valid structured data, and helpful content — so a page eligible for one is usually eligible for the other, though rich results and AI Overviews are separate features with independent triggering logic.

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