Schema Markup
Also called Schema.org markup, Structured data markup.
Schema markup is structured data added to a webpage using the Schema.org vocabulary, telling search engines and AI systems explicitly what each part of the content represents.
What it means
Schema markup is the practical implementation of structured data using the Schema.org vocabulary — a shared standard maintained by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. It's added to a page using JSON-LD (the recommended format), Microdata, or RDFa.
Schema markup serves two distinct purposes in 2026. For Google, it powers rich results — FAQ accordions, recipe cards, breadcrumb trails, star ratings, event cards — that appear directly in search results. For AI engines, it provides explicit machine-readable context that makes content easier to extract and cite when generating answers.
The most-used schema types fall into a small set: Organization and WebSite (sitewide), BreadcrumbList (every page), Article (blog posts), Product/Offer/AggregateRating (ecommerce), FAQPage (any page with Q&A), HowTo (any process content), LocalBusiness (anything with a physical location), and Person (team and author pages). Most sites should ship 4-6 schema types as standard.
Key takeaways
- JSON-LD is the recommended schema format — placed in <script type='application/ld+json'>
- Schema markup is the single highest-leverage technical SEO work for AI engine citation
- Validate every schema with both validator.schema.org and Google's Rich Results Test
- Faking schema (e.g., FAQ schema with no visible FAQ content) triggers manual penalties
- Schema.org markup
- Structured data markup
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