Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Concept
Machine-readable markup, usually Schema.org in JSON-LD, that describes a page's content and can make it eligible for rich results.
Glossary · Structured data
Machine-readable markup that describes a page's content, so Google understands it more accurately and the page can become eligible for rich results.
Documented in
Google's Inside Googlebot post warns that bloated inline base64 images, large blocks of inline CSS or JavaScript, or megabytes of menus can push a page's text or structured data past Googlebot's 2MB cutoff, and advises moving heavy CSS and JavaScript to external files and placing meta tags, the title, the canonical and essential structured data high in the HTML.
Search Central blog (31 March 2026) · Day 1 · How crawling works
Google's guide to temporarily pausing an online business recommends that a shop expecting to sell again within weeks or months stays online with limited functionality, such as a disabled cart, and updates its Product structured data to show current availability.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · Welcome to indexing day!
Google's sitemap guide says Google uses lastmod only when it is consistently and verifiably accurate, and counts a change to the main content, the structured data or the links of a page as significant, but not a changed copyright date.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · Welcome to indexing day!
Google's general structured data guidelines recommend placing the same structured data on all duplicate pages of the same content, not just on the canonical page.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · Finding the gold nuggets: structured data, media, and more!
Google's guidance on generative AI content warns that AI output can contain hallucinations and says AI-generated metadata, including structured data and image alt text, should be fact-checked before publishing and the markup validated.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's structured data documentation says not to mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page, and not to add structured data about information that users cannot see even if it is accurate.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
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 general structured data guidelines say a structured data manual action removes a page's eligibility for rich results but does not affect how the page ranks in web search.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's Event structured data guide says to give a date without a time, such as 2019-08-15, when the start hour is not known, and to include the UTC or GMT offset whenever a time is given.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's Discover documentation says content is automatically eligible for Discover if it is indexed and meets Discover's content policies, needs no special tags or structured data, and is not guaranteed to appear.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · Uncovering Trustworthy Experiences on Discover
Google's Visual Elements gallery describes a text result as based on the page's textual content, with attribution, title link and snippet; attribution can include the site name, favicon and visible URL, and a rich result typically relies on structured data.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · How Search results are born
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 site name documentation says site names are generated automatically from a site's home page and references to it on the web, and that a site can indicate its preferred name with WebSite structured data on its home page.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · How Search results are born
Google's Product structured data introduction says that providing both on-page structured data and a Merchant Center feed maximizes eligibility for shopping experiences and helps Google understand and verify the data; product snippets may take pricing from the feed when the markup lacks it.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · How Search results are born
Merchant Center's automatic item updates use structured data and other product data found on landing pages to fix price, sale price, availability and condition mismatches in a merchant's product data; Google says they do not replace regular feed updates.
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.
Google gave four reasons why structured data is still valuable even though models can extract information from pages: precision, extra content, efficiency and focus.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Structured data gives the high precision that complex schemas such as sale pricing need, with higher accuracy than large-scale extraction by large language models (LLMs).
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Structured data often carries non-visible metadata that the page text lacks, such as full ISO dates or stable identifiers for user-generated content.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Parsing structured data is significantly cheaper and more efficient than relying on LLMs for every complex extraction task.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Rule-based parsing of markup is nearly free by comparison with AI models, so Google will always prefer extracting information from structured data over model-based extraction.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Structured data explicitly points to the pertinent data on a page, which reduces noise and stops Google's systems from pulling in extraneous information such as prices of related products.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's systems sometimes fail to determine a page's main content correctly, and structured data helps because site owners tend to mark up what is actually important rather than boilerplate or ads.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Several plug-ins emitting the same markup type is one of the most common structured data problems: the duplicates can make an event details page look like a list of events and change how Google interprets the page.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google announced server-side structured data validation as coming soon: it will publish downloadable validation rules in SHACL on each structured data feature guide, with other kinds of checks to follow.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
The SHACL rules will not replace Search Console as the canonical place for structured data reports, because some checks use Google's internal libraries and cannot be expressed in SHACL, but they will catch problems such as a missing required field.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google plans a SHACL rule set for each of its structured data feature types and will release the rule sets gradually once they have been checked.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
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
Google usually picks up structured data updates within hours to one or two weeks, sometimes immediately.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
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!
Structured data can bring more qualified traffic, because the site can be shown in new, more interesting ways to more people, who are then more likely to click.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
The structured data Google processes is not fed very differently to AI Overviews and AI Mode: after cleaning and quality work, the same data goes to both the classic results page and the AI features.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google will never penalise a site just for having more structured data on its pages than Google uses; extra markup does not hurt.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Describing every semantic detail of a page in markup is probably not worth the effort; focus on the structured data that Google or other consumers actually use.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's structured data types fall roughly into two groups: broad page-level types such as breadcrumbs and article, and vertical-specific types such as recipes, events and products.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Pick only the structured data types that are relevant to a page instead of adding every type Google is interested in.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
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.
Test structured data manually first and only then put it into the site's templates.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's structured data speaker said that in the months before the event Google added support for validity dates on sale prices in product structured data, so merchants no longer need to rush to remove a sale price when the sale ends for fear it shows wrongly in snippets.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Structured data makes pages eligible to appear as rich results, Google's structured data talk said in its recap.
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
Google said that if AI Mode one day showcases images, recipes or similar elements, those parts would need structured data, but in their current form AI Mode and AI Overviews require pretty much nothing extra.
Article structured data is a broad type with many properties and nested types, which Google uses to learn more about published content, such as its headline, author and publication date.
Google's rich results slide said Article structured data is not required to appear in Top Stories but is highly recommended for all articles.
Product annotations on Google Images results also come from product structured data and do not need Google Merchant Center.
To appear in the Shopping tab of Google Search, a product must be submitted in Google Merchant Center; product structured data alone is not enough.
Web markup is an efficient and unambiguous way for sites to share product data with Google, Google Shopping said, repeating the Day 2 structured data talk.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google may never use structured data from a site it does not trust: once it sees markup it does not trust, it does not touch it.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Google's closing slide said AI on Google is just SEO: AI features on Google Search use exactly the same processes as traditional results, so no new acronym is needed, as none was for mobile-first indexing or structured data.
Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Structured data turns the loosely structured web into structured information that powers visual search features such as review stars and recipe filters (for example by preparation time).
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's developer site has a number of case studies that show traffic and session-duration gains from structured data.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
A Google case study shown on stage (published May 2018) reported that Rakuten Recipes got 2.7 times more traffic from search engines and a 1.5 times increase in session duration after implementing recipe structured data.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google recommends using the Search gallery in its developer documentation to find the structured data features that suit a site; the gallery shows each feature and how Google uses the markup.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google recommends testing and previewing structured data in the Rich Results Test, which shows the rich result features it detected and whether the markup is valid.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Structured data that is not relevant to the page's content can be treated as abusive: Google's filters make it ineffective, and egregious cases can lead to a manual action.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Use unique identifiers in structured data, for example the homepage URL in an organisation's url property, so Google can tell which specific entity is meant rather than reading just a name string.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's shopping structured data launches of the previous year (2025) added support for merchant loyalty programs and shipping policies, letting merchants define a policy at organisation level and specify details at product level.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google keeps adding structured data features and recommendations but also removes them: in the previous year (2025) it removed several features that brought little benefit and were little used.
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.
AI Mode and AI Overviews are not rich results but standard search features: they need no structured data to function and work with the normal text results from Google's index.
Google's structured data feature guide lists the kinds of structured data Google supports with a search feature and what each can do to a site's search results.
Google's Article rich results slide said structured data can be used to indicate that content is behind a paywall.
Review structured data lets a site specify how its users rated something; the review snippet shows an average star rating and often the number of reviews of a product, service or piece of content.
Google Search displays product rich results from product structured data; it may also use the product data a merchant provides in Google Merchant Center, but Merchant Center is not required for them.
Product structured data can help Merchant Center in some cases, for example during data validation, but Merchant Center does not require it.
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
A community speaker said technical SEO remains the foundation for AI search, with site architecture showing the structure and thematic connections of content and structured data adding clarity, but that a technically sound site is only the beginning.
Jovana Avramovic · Day 1 · Lightning session C: Crawling
Inside Google, views on structured data split into two camps: one says it is useless because models can generate it or read the page directly, the other says it is the future of machines talking to each other through MCP servers and new standards; the speaker said the truth is in the middle.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
The speaker called the Rakuten study old and said the world has changed a lot, but expects the link between structured data and more interactive, visually appealing results to hold for the foreseeable future.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
More shopping structured data news was left for a Day 3 talk by a Google colleague, Alex.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
A community speaker said the chapters and entities extracted from an interview transcript can then be used to generate metadata and structured data for the published content.
Patrick Domanico · Day 2 · Lightning session F: Media
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
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
Keep a product page that is out of stock for a few months live with a 200 status, show its availability on the page and in Product structured data, and offer pre-ordering where possible when users would wait for the product. Redirect it only when users would rather switch to a similar product than wait.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Welcome to indexing day!
Because Google extracts structured data, images and videos only after deduplication, put markup and media on the URL you want as canonical and keep them identical on its duplicates; markup that exists only on a duplicate that loses canonical selection may never be extracted.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Finding the gold nuggets: structured data, media, and more!
The 'non-visible metadata' argument is not a licence to mark up hidden content, since Google's structured data guidelines still require markup to describe what users can see; use markup for the machine-precise form of facts the page shows, such as a full ISO date with time zone for a visible event date or a homepage url for a named organisation.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Day 2 said the structured data Google processes also feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode (D2-C476), while Day 3 said these features do not need structured data to function: markup is not a condition for appearing in AI features, but data taken from it can still reach them.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How Search results are born
For an online shop, Product structured data is enough for product rich results and Google Images product annotations, but the Shopping tab needs a Merchant Center feed too; keep feed and markup values identical, since Google can use the markup to validate the feed.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How Search results are born
Kit items about Structured data: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Rests on 9 claims, 8 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Spend no effort on llms.txt, AI text files or AI-specific markup for Google
Rests on 15 claims, 5 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Mark up only content that is visible on the page and relevant to it
Rests on 5 claims, 5 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Choose the specific types Google documents for its features, and skip generic or irrelevant ones
Rests on 7 claims, 5 of them naming Structured data
Identify entities with unique identifiers: url, @id and stable IDs
Rests on 3 claims, 3 of them naming Structured data
Write dates in ISO 8601 and give every date-time a UTC offset
Rests on 5 claims, 3 of them naming Structured data
Validate markup in the Rich Results Test before it reaches templates, and monitor it after release
Rests on 8 claims, 3 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Wire Google's SHACL validation rules into the build once they are published
Rests on 6 claims, 3 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Add Article markup with headline, images, dates and authors to every article template
Rests on 5 claims, 3 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Keep temporarily out-of-stock product pages live with 200 and their current availability
Rests on 5 claims, 2 of them naming Structured data
Describe only the page's main product in Product markup, not related-product carousels
Rests on 4 claims, 2 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Mark up merchant listings completely, with validity dates for sale prices
Rests on 7 claims, 2 of them naming Structured data
Declare return, shipping and loyalty policies once at organisation level
Rests on 4 claims, 2 of them naming Structured data
Put the same structured data on duplicate URLs as on the canonical
Rests on 3 claims, 2 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Plan releases and fixes around Google's processing times, and judge results only after them
Rests on 11 claims, 1 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Keep each HTML response well under 2 MB and put the main content and JSON-LD early
Rests on 2 claims, 1 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Write structured data as JSON-LD by default
Rests on 4 claims, 1 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Emit each structured data entity once per page, and audit CMS plug-ins for duplicates
Rests on 2 claims, 1 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
State the preferred site name with WebSite markup on the home page
Rests on 2 claims, 1 of them naming Structured data; its own words name Structured data
Also instory angle A-001glossary terms Rich results, Merchant Center, Search features, Google Discover, JSON-LD, Review snippet, Rich Results Test, SHACL, Site name, Structured data
Structured data makes pages eligible to appear as rich results, Google's structured data talk said in its recap.
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.
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.