Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Standard
The shared vocabulary of types and properties that structured data uses, launched by the major search engines in 2011.
Glossary · Schema.org
The shared markup vocabulary that major search engines announced together in June 2011; Google uses only the subsets its documentation declares.
Documented in
Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features lists 'overfocusing on structured data' among the things site owners don't need to do: structured data is not required for generative AI search and no special schema.org markup is needed, though it remains worth using because it helps pages become eligible for rich results.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's Discover documentation says to specify the large image with schema.org markup or the og:image meta tag, which can influence the thumbnail Discover chooses, and that a vertical image cropped to 16x9 must keep its important details.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · Uncovering Trustworthy Experiences on Discover
Google's AI features guide says there are no additional requirements, and no special schema.org structured data, needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode; a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · How Search results are born
Google's Merchant Center help says products and details crawled from an online store can show up on Google even when they are not marked up with schema.org or added in Merchant Center, and lists the Shopping tab among the places Merchant Center free listings appear.
Google Merchant Center Help · Day 3 · How Search results are born
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
In the speaker's own tests, even the latest LLMs asked to generate schema.org markup for a page often invent properties that do not exist, get deeply nested schemas such as complex pricing models wrong, and duplicate content across several fields.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
As far as the speaker knows, in most of Google's main AI uses a page's schema.org markup is not turned into text and put directly into the model's context; the data is first sorted out, checked for quality and indexed before it is passed on as grounding context.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
The speaker said there are concerns that feeding raw schema.org markup straight into an AI model's context would be a big abuse vector, one reason Google does not do so.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Schema.org, in which Google is a major participant, began publishing usage statistics for all its types and properties in 2026, showing in buckets how many domains use each one; the data is also in schema.org's GitHub repository.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google often needs to see a markup type adopted on websites before it invests in a feature that uses it, a chicken-and-egg problem that the schema.org usage statistics are meant to help break.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Schema.org added support for RDF lists and sets, which give a way to express ordered values, because RDF triples are not ordered by nature.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Schema.org product markup on websites is another source of billions of product offers for Google Shopping, next to merchant feeds.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Most of the new conversational feed attributes were already available in schema.org, so Google ties them back to structured data and can use them from product markup as well as from feeds.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Product Q&A can be marked up in schema.org by linking Question items, each with an acceptedAnswer of type Answer, to the product through the subjectOf property, because the product is the subject of the Q&A.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
A recent schema.org release added two properties, specification and valueGroup, so that the Merchant Center product detail attribute can be expressed in schema.org, with product specs nested under specification.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Rich, less structured product data that is not prescribed by Google, schema.org or any feed or data model is increasingly important, because the merchant or brand knows best what to provide.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Marking something up with only a very generic schema.org type says little about it and is very hard for Google to use.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google uses schema.org as its markup vocabulary but mostly consumes only the subsets that its developer documentation declares, for the features it builds.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google works to make sure that what merchants can express in its shopping feeds can also be expressed in schema.org, adding vocabulary where schema.org lacks it, for example for product details.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google named the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), next to the Merchant Center feed, as an industry standard whose capabilities it also wants schema.org to cover.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Schema.org is a common vocabulary that several major search engines started together so that site owners can mark up pages and every consumer interprets the markup the same way; the speaker put its start 15 to 20 years ago (Google, Bing and Yahoo! announced it in June 2011).
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Product snippets in Google Search are powered by both shopping feeds and schema.org structured data.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google Shopping pointed to a Google holiday shopping blog post with early results from real merchants using the conversational attributes, and to the Merchant Center Help Center and schema.org for the attributes and properties.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Schema.org is an open public collaboration, and the speaker invited people who enjoy ontologies and data to join it.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's AI optimisation guide says structured data is not required for generative AI search and needs no special schema.org markup, and on Day 2 Google said raw schema.org is generally not put into model context (D2-C477); use markup for rich-result eligibility and clear data, not as an AI-visibility lever.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
There is no separate markup for AI features: by Google's account the same processed markup feeds classic results and AI answers, and raw schema.org is generally not passed into model context, so invest in the types Google documents for its features rather than in extra markup written for AI.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Markup for schema.org types that Google does not use yet is a bet on future features; check a type's usage bucket on schema.org before investing, since adoption is what Google says it watches before building a feature.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
For Discover, set max-image-preview:large on article templates, give every article a relevant image at least 1,200 px wide in og:image or schema.org markup that is neither the site logo nor text-heavy, and show clear bylines and dates.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Uncovering Trustworthy Experiences on Discover
As of 3 October 2026 Google's Merchant Center help lists no schema.org property for question_and_answer, document_link, related_product, popularity_rank, variant_option or product_detail (only item_group_title maps, to ProductGroup.name), and Search Central does not document such markup: reading these attributes from schema.org is a stage statement, the feed is the documented route.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Schema.org's release notes show version 30.1 (16 September 2026) added specification, isOftenBoughtWith and consumerNotice for Product, valueGroup for PropertyValue and itemPopularity for Offer as vocabulary for retail feed data; Google's Search Central docs did not yet document these properties on 3 October 2026.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Shop developers should first keep core feed and markup values (price, availability, brand, GTIN) accurate, then add Q&As, product highlights, specs as key-value product details and related products in the Merchant Center feed, and mirror them in schema.org Product markup only as Google documents support for it.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Kit items about Schema.org: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Treat product Q&A and specification markup in schema.org as an extra on top of the feed
Rests on 6 claims, 5 of them naming Schema.org; its own words name Schema.org
Spend no effort on llms.txt, AI text files or AI-specific markup for Google
Rests on 15 claims, 3 of them naming Schema.org
Give every article a large, relevant lead image and declare it in og:image or markup
Rests on 6 claims, 2 of them naming Schema.org; its own words name Schema.org
Choose the specific types Google documents for its features, and skip generic or irrelevant ones
Rests on 7 claims, 2 of them naming Schema.org; its own words name Schema.org
Also inglossary terms Schema.org, Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.