A community speaker said a third-party study from early 2026 found that websites with JSON-LD were shown much more often, and that the industry reacted by adding schema markup everywhere.
Thiago Pojda · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
Thing · Standard
JSON-LD
The JSON-based format for structured data that Google recommends.
- Claims
- 12
- In Google’s docs
- 0
- Said at the event
- 10
- Not in docs
- 2
- Kit items
- 4
Glossary · JSON-LD
The structured data syntax Google recommends: one contiguous block that is easier to write correctly. Microdata and RDFa are interpreted the same way.
Google’s documentation 0
Documented in
Said at the event 10
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
Label
Grade
Day
Not in docs 2
Microdata has an advantage when payload size matters: embedded in the existing HTML, it avoids duplicating the page content in a separate JSON-LD block.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Consistent with docs 3
The 'gold nuggets' that Google's feature extraction step pulls out of a page's HTML are structured data (such as JSON-LD), images and videos.
Gary Illyes · Day 2 · Finding the gold nuggets: structured data, media, and more!
Google accepts three structured data syntaxes, JSON-LD, microdata and RDFa, which are all valid and are extracted at the very start into the same pipelines, so they are interpreted identically downstream.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google strongly suggests describing a video's metadata with JSON-LD structured data, on top of placing the video in an HTML element on the page.
Gary Illyes · Day 2 · Using images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videos
Confirmed by docs 4
Google recommends JSON-LD because it is one contiguous block that is easier to author, so people make fewer mistakes with it.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Rich results differ from other search features because Google builds them from extra data that site owners provide, usually structured data and usually in JSON-LD format.
Confirmed by docsD3-C334
Google's Article slide showed the NewsArticle JSON-LD example from Google's Article documentation: a block in the page head with headline, three image URLs (1x1, 4x3 and 16x9), datePublished and dateModified with time zone offsets, and an author list of Person objects with name and url.
In product markup, an offer's shipping and return information can point through a JSON-LD identifier (@id) to shipping and return data defined elsewhere.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Nothing to verify 1
StageD1-C250
In a community demo, a fix loop gave a large LLM (Claude Opus) the current markup, the errors Google's test reported and Google's documentation, had it write new JSON-LD and re-ran the test, with at most three attempts; the demo's page passed on the second.
Press and analysis 2
AnalysisD1-C269
Author's view: an LLM fix loop that stops when Google's test passes proves only that the JSON-LD is valid, not that its values are true; Google's generative AI content guidance asks for AI-generated structured data to be fact-checked as well as validated.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
AnalysisD2-C497
Default to JSON-LD and switch to microdata only where page weight is critical, since Google interprets all three syntaxes identically and JSON-LD is the one people get wrong least often.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Built on these claims 4
Kit items about JSON-LD: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Developer requirements 3
Write structured data as JSON-LD by default
Rests on 4 claims, 4 of them naming JSON-LD; its own words name JSON-LD
Describe videos with VideoObject markup and mark key moments with Clip or SeekToAction
Rests on 3 claims, 1 of them naming JSON-LD; its own words name JSON-LD
Keep each HTML response well under 2 MB and put the main content and JSON-LD early
Rests on 2 claims, 0 of them naming JSON-LD; its own words name JSON-LD
Also inglossary term JSON-LD
Connected things 2
Most often named with it
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.