Glossary
What is Structured Data (JSON-LD)?
Structured data is standardized markup — commonly written in JSON-LD format — added to a page's code to explicitly describe its content to search engines, enabling rich results and better machine understanding.
Search engines are reasonably good at inferring what a page is about from its visible text, but structured data removes the guesswork by stating it explicitly, using a shared vocabulary (schema.org) that both major search engines and AI systems recognize. A recipe page can mark up its exact prep time, ingredient list, and star rating; a business page can mark up its address, hours, and review score — each as a discrete, machine-readable field rather than text a crawler has to parse and interpret.
JSON-LD is the format Google recommends over the two older alternatives (Microdata and RDFa) because it lives in a single script block rather than being woven inline through the HTML, which makes it far easier to generate, validate, and maintain — especially on a site where the same template renders thousands of pages. Common types include Organization, Person, Product, Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, and Review.
The direct payoff is rich results — star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumb trails, and sitelinks shown directly in search results — but the less visible benefit has grown just as important: structured data is also how AI-driven answer engines and chatbots most reliably extract accurate facts about a page's content when summarizing or citing it, rather than relying on scraping and interpreting unstructured prose.