Structured data (Schema.org)
Machine-readable markup describing what a page is about.
Structured data is standardized, machine-readable markup that explicitly describes what a page is about — a business, a product, an FAQ, a dataset — so search and AI engines can interpret entities and relationships without inferring them from raw text. The dominant vocabulary is Schema.org, launched on 2 June 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo! (Yandex joined in November 2011), and developed through an open community process.
Schema.org can be embedded as Microdata, RDFa or JSON-LD; Google recommends JSON-LD (a script block in the page head). Valid markup makes a page eligible — not guaranteed — for rich results and knowledge-graph features. Adoption is vast: as of 2024, 45+ million domains publish 450+ billion Schema.org objects. For AI visibility, structured data is a foundational lever because it gives engines unambiguous, citable facts about an entity.
Sources
- Schema.org (vocabulary & documentation) — Schema.org
- Schema.org: Evolution of Structured Data on the Web — ACM Queue (peer-reviewed)
- Intro to how structured data works — Google Search Central