Structured data

A person reading "Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m." on your website knows at once what is meant. A machine at first sees only text. Structured data is the addition that turns text into a statement: an opening time starts here, that is a company name, that a postal address, that a price, that a question with its matching answer.

Technically this addition sits in a block of its own in the source code, usually in a format called JSON-LD, and is invisible to visitors. The vocabulary for it is called Schema.org and has been maintained jointly since 2011 by four search engine operators — Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. It is therefore not a Google creation but a shared language that other systems read too.

The visible benefit shows up in the search result. A plain listing can turn into an enhanced result: with opening hours, with expandable questions, with an image, with a price range, with an event date. Such results take up more space on the search results page and are therefore noticed more often — which, however, is not a promise but a possibility.

Precisely that limitation belongs here, because it is often left unsaid: structured data is not a ranking factor and no guarantee of an enhanced display. Google decides for each query whether it shows the additional details. What you can do is create the precondition; whether it is used is for the search engine to determine.

The second benefit is by now almost the more important one. Language models and AI answers have to extract from a page which statement belongs to which thing. A page that supplies its details marked up is easier for a machine to understand correctly than one that says the same thing only in prose. That is part of what we mean by AI visibility.

For most businesses a few types from the large vocabulary are enough. A description of the company with address, area and hours. Markup of the questions and answers, where there are any. Markup of the navigation path, so the search engine sees where a page hangs in the structure. For hotels and restaurants, details about the property are added; for law firms, rather the assignment of practice areas.

One rule stands above all others: only what is also visible on the page may be marked up. Review stars without genuine reviews, prices that do not exist in that form, or opening hours nobody keeps — that is not merely a breach of the guidelines leading to the loss of the enhanced display. It is at the same time a misleading statement towards consumers, and stating reviews without a verifiable basis is expressly prohibited.

The result can be checked free of charge. Google provides a test for enhanced results, and the Search Console shows for your own domain which markup was recognised and where faults sit. We set the details so that they match the visible content, and then measure against the delivered source code, not against the template — what is in the file is not always what arrives. On multilingual websites we check every language version individually, because markup there has been known to run only in the original language.