Structured data

Structured data is markup that tells an engine what a page is about in explicit terms: this is a product with this price, this is an article by this author, this is a local business at this address with these hours. It turns prose that a machine has to interpret into facts a machine can read directly. The dominant vocabulary is Schema.org, and the recommended format is JSON-LD.

Structured data does two jobs. The classic one is rich-result eligibility: review stars, FAQ accordions, product prices, and breadcrumbs in the search results, which can lift click-through. The increasingly important one is entity disambiguation: schema helps an engine connect your page to the right entity in its knowledge graph, which is exactly what AI engines rely on when they decide whether to trust and cite a source.

The discipline is to mark up what is actually on the page (Google penalizes mismatched or invisible markup), to use the types that match your content, and to validate against the live Schema.org spec rather than a stale snapshot. The competitor we benchmark against ships zero JSON-LD across its own pages, which is a striking gap for an SEO tool. We ship comprehensive schema on our own surfaces and audit yours.