GLOSSARY

Structured data

(schema markup · schema.org markup)

Structured data: Structured data is machine-readable markup — schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD — that states a page's facts explicitly: what the business is, what it offers, where, at what price, reviewed how. Engines assembling answers prefer facts they can parse over prose they must interpret, making schema the cheapest credibility you can add.

August 3, 2026

Prose forces an engine to infer; markup lets it read. A snippet like this leaves nothing to interpretation:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Example Plumbing Co.",
  "areaServed": "Denver, CO",
  "telephone": "+1-303-555-0100",
  "openingHours": "Mo-Sa 07:00-19:00"
}

LocalBusiness schema, minimal example.

The visibility value runs through entities: schema on your own site is the first-party assertion of your entity's facts, which directories and registries then corroborate, hardening into the knowledge graph engines trust at answer time. FAQ and Article markup also make question-answer structure explicit, complementing the extraction-friendly writing on the visible page. The types that matter vary by business: Product and Offer for e-commerce, Attorney and LegalService for firms, Physician for practices, FinancialService for advisors.

Two honest boundaries. Schema describes; it doesn't rank — marking up mediocre content produces well-described mediocre content. And schema must mirror the visible page: markup asserting things the page doesn't say is a trust violation engines are increasingly good at catching. Done right, it's quiet infrastructure — the reason an engine states your hours, prices and credentials correctly instead of guessing from a third-party scrape. Buyers often know this whole topic by the alias 'schema markup'; same thing.

Find out where you stand.