Not in docsD2-C458
Google gave four reasons why structured data is still valuable even though models can extract information from pages: precision, extra content, efficiency and focus.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo, transcript
Things
Day 2 · Thursday 1 October 2026 · 13:35
What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Named in the previous speaker's hand-over ('Ryan is going to talk about how we are actually dealing with structured data'), heard clearly in a second attendee recording; he said he has been a software engineer at Google for about 15 years, focused on data ingestion.
Shown on screen 11
Not in docsD2-C459
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).
“Structured data provides the high precision needed for complex schema (sale pricing), achieving higher accuracy than large-scale LLM extraction.”
Wording checked against the slide or recording
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo, transcript
Things
Not in docsD2-C463
Structured data often carries non-visible metadata that the page text lacks, such as full ISO dates or stable identifiers for user-generated content.
“It often contains non-visible metadata, such as full ISO dates or stable identifiers for UGC, that is not present in the page text.”
Wording checked against the slide or recording
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo, transcript
Things
Used byrequirements DEV-SDA-04, DEV-SDA-05
Not in docsD2-C469
Parsing structured data is significantly cheaper and more efficient than relying on LLMs for every complex extraction task.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo, transcript
Things
- Repeated by D3-C405 Day 3: Web markup is an efficient and unambiguous way for sites to share product data with Google, Google Shopping…
Not in docsD2-C473
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo, transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-07
Confirmed by docsD2-C482
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo, transcript
Things
Confirmed by docsD2-C490
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo, transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-03
- Structured data markup that Google Search supports
- Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search
- Repeated by D3-C329 Day 3: Google's structured data feature guide lists the kinds of structured data Google supports with a search…
Confirmed by docsD2-C498
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo, transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-11glossary term Rich Results Test
Not in docsD2-C514
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo, transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-12glossary term SHACL
Not in docsD2-C515
Google's planned validation workflow has five steps: download the rules from the feature guide, generate the JSON or embedded microdata or RDFa, run the rules against the generated server-side markup as a first check, deploy and test in the Rich Results Test, and monitor ongoing performance in Search Console.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-12
Consistent with docsD2-C518
Google's example SHACL shape for Event requires a name, treats a missing description only as a warning, and accepts the image either as an ImageObject or as a URL.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence slide photo, transcript
Said on stage 46
StageD2-C452
Search results have moved from ten blue links to feature-rich, media-rich results because users wanted more.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
AI Overviews and AI Mode launched as fairly text-heavy answers with little image content and few tables, and they have become more structured over time because that is what users want.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
- Extends D1-C011 Day 1: Ecosystem principle 2, the SERP will evolve: besides organic links and ads, it will hold other elements such…
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).
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byglossary term Rich results
- Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search
- Review snippet (Review, AggregateRating) structured data
- Extended by D3-C337 Day 3: Review structured data lets a site specify how its users rated something; the review snippet shows an average…
Describing a page's content in a structured way lets Google understand and interpret that content more accurately.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Used byglossary term Structured data
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
StageD2-C457
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-11
Automatic LLM extraction of structured information makes a great demo but is not yet good enough for extraction that aims at something like 99.9% accuracy, the speaker said.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Google's own extraction systems focus heavily on what is visible on a page, which improves precision but means they can miss content or interpret it incorrectly.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Gemini in Chrome relies heavily on the screenshot it takes of a page.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-HTM-04
- Extends D1-C131 Day 1: Google's guide for generative AI features says browser agents may read a site through screenshots, the DOM…
Markup can state a date as a full ISO 8601 value, which disambiguates a visible date whose local time zone Google might not detect correctly; this matters for event extraction and wherever the date must be exactly right.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-05
Even Google cannot afford to run complex AI models on every page in its index, and distilling them into cheaper models makes them less precise.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
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.
“So we're always going to prefer that particular approach.”
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-07
- Extends D2-C028 Day 2: Google extracts every element of a page so that it can tell the header, the navigation and the main content…
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-AIF-02
- Extends D1-C038 Day 1: AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on…
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
- Extends D1-C061 Day 1: Google's guide says new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup are not needed to appear in…
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Google's developer site has a number of case studies that show traffic and session-duration gains from structured data.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
StageD2-C483
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
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).
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byglossary term Schema.org
StageD2-C485
Schema.org is an open public collaboration, and the speaker invited people who enjoy ontologies and data to join it.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Marking something up with only a very generic schema.org type says little about it and is very hard for Google to use.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-03
Google uses schema.org as its markup vocabulary but mostly consumes only the subsets that its developer documentation declares, for the features it builds.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-03glossary term Schema.org
Google will never penalise a site just for having more structured data on its pages than Google uses; extra markup does not hurt.
“we will never penalize you for having more structured data on your pages”
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-03
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-03
- Extended by D3-C378 Day 3: Google Shopping called rich data with light structure the AI sweet spot: a little structure that helps the AI…
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Pick only the structured data types that are relevant to a page instead of adding every type Google is interested in.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-03
Most sites now run on content management systems whose plug-ins generate the markup, so check that the plug-ins in your stack produce good markup, for example a calendar plug-in that outputs event markup.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-01glossary term JSON-LD
Google recommends JSON-LD because it is one contiguous block that is easier to author, so people make fewer mistakes with it.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-01glossary term JSON-LD
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-01
Test structured data manually first and only then put it into the site's templates.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-11
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-02
- Extended by D3-C647 Day 3: Google may never use structured data from a site it does not trust: once it sees markup it does not trust, it…
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirements DEV-SDA-04, DEV-SDA-09
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-06
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-09
- Loyalty program (MemberProgram) structured data
- Merchant shipping policy (ShippingService) structured data
- Latest documentation updates
- Extended by D3-C383 Day 3: In product markup, an offer's shipping and return information can point through a JSON-LD identifier (@id) to…
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-08
- Extended by D3-C396 Day 3: Google works to make sure that what merchants can express in its shopping feeds can also be expressed in…
StageD2-C509
More shopping structured data news was left for a Day 3 talk by a Google colleague, Alex.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
- Extended by D3-C365 Day 3: Google added six Merchant Center feed attributes for AI shopping experiences: question and answer, documents…
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
- Extends D1-C120 Day 1: To get Google to build something, such as an addition to an API, report and request it publicly and in volume.
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
The SHACL rules are meant to run inside a site's content generation, so markup is sanity-checked before it is published and does not silently regress later, a breakage site owners might otherwise discover only through a Search Console report.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-12glossary term SHACL
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-12
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-12
Structured data makes pages eligible to appear as rich results, Google's structured data talk said in its recap.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Used byglossary terms Rich results, Structured data
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.
Speaker Ryan LeveringEvidence transcript
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-03
What Google's documentation says 8
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.
Publisher Google Search Central
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-11
- Extends D1-C250 Day 1: In a community demo, a fix loop gave a large LLM (Claude Opus) the current markup, the errors Google's test…
- Extended by D2-C947 Day 2: In a community speaker's case, an LLM asked to write alt text for a product image of a veterinary anxiety…
- Extended by D2-C952 Day 2: A community speaker warned that articles still recommend rewriting alt text with AI, called AI a tool, and…
- Extended by D3-C686 Day 3: Hallucinations can happen with any AI model, and with current training methods there is no way to get rid of…
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.
“don't add structured data about information that is not visible to the user, even if the information is accurate”
Publisher Google Search Central
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-02
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.
Publisher Google Search Central
Used byrequirement DEV-AIF-02
- Extends D1-C061 Day 1: Google's guide says new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup are not needed to appear in…
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.
Publisher Google Search Central
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-02
Google's documentation updates log calls the July 2026 sale price change a clarification: a new Sale duration section of the merchant listing guide explains validFrom with validThrough or priceValidUntil, aligned with Merchant Center's sale_price_effective_date attribute.
Publisher Google Search Central
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-08
Google's merchant listing guide says Product rich results only support pages that focus on a single product, or on several variants of the same product.
Publisher Google Search Central
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-07
Google's merchant listing guide warns that a listing may not display if its priceValidUntil property indicates a past date.
Publisher Google Search Central
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-08
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.
Publisher Google Search Central
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-05
Analysis by the author 9
AnalysisD2-C468
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.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Things
Used byrequirements DEV-SDA-02, DEV-SDA-04, DEV-SDA-05
AnalysisD2-C472
Do not drop markup on the assumption that AI reads the page anyway: by Google's own account LLM extraction is not precise enough for prices and nested offers and too costly to run on every page, so explicit markup remains the dependable route for those facts.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
AnalysisD2-C475
On product pages with related-product or recently-viewed carousels, make sure the Product markup describes only the main item and its price; Google's own example of what markup prevents was pulling a price from related products.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-07
AnalysisD2-C479
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.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-AIF-02
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.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-01
AnalysisD2-C504
Audit CMS templates for duplicate markup by running one page per template through the Rich Results Test and checking whether an SEO plug-in and a theme or events plug-in emit the same type twice; 'more markup never hurts' covers relevant, non-duplicated markup only.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-06
AnalysisD2-C508
For time-limited sales, give the sale price its validity dates in the product markup (Google's merchant listing documentation describes validFrom, validThrough and priceValidUntil) instead of editing markup by hand when the sale ends, and keep the dates aligned with the Merchant Center feed.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-08
AnalysisD2-C513
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.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Things
AnalysisD2-C520
When the SHACL rules appear, wire them into the build or CMS publishing step as an automated test, so a template change that drops a required property fails before deployment instead of surfacing weeks later in Search Console.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Things
Used byrequirement DEV-SDA-12
Links to other sessions 23
- Stage D2-C452 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Search results have moved from ten blue links to feature-rich, media-rich results because users wanted more.
extendsD1-C011 Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotesEcosystem principle 2, the SERP will evolve: besides organic links and ads, it will hold other elements such as videos and cards.
- Stage D2-C452 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Search results have moved from ten blue links to feature-rich, media-rich results because users wanted more.
extendsStage D1-C158 Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotesGoogle said that even the classic ten-blue-links layout was settled only after millions of experiments, as part of using as much data as possible for product decisions.
- Stage D2-C453 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
AI Overviews and AI Mode launched as fairly text-heavy answers with little image content and few tables, and they have become more structured over time because that is what users want.
extendsD1-C011 Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotesEcosystem principle 2, the SERP will evolve: besides organic links and ads, it will hold other elements such as videos and cards.
- Docs D2-C462 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
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.
extendsStage D1-C250 Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AIIn 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.
- Stage D2-C465 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Gemini in Chrome relies heavily on the screenshot it takes of a page.
extendsDocs D1-C131 Day 1 · session not recordedGoogle's guide for generative AI features says browser agents may read a site through screenshots, the DOM structure and the accessibility tree, and recommends semantic HTML because it helps users such as screen reader users navigate a page.
- Stage D2-C474 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.
extendsD2-C028 Day 2 · How is HTML interpretedGoogle extracts every element of a page so that it can tell the header, the navigation and the main content apart, and a slide labelled the main content as very important.
- Stage D2-C476 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.
extendsD1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.
- Stage D2-C477 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.
extendsDocs D1-C061 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?Google's guide says new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup are not needed to appear in Search, and that such files neither harm nor help visibility because Google Search ignores them.
- Docs D2-C480 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.
extendsDocs D1-C061 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?Google's guide says new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup are not needed to appear in Search, and that such files neither harm nor help visibility because Google Search ignores them.
- Stage D2-C511 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.
extends - Stage D2-C521 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.
extends - Stage D2-C947 Day 2 · Lightning session F: Media
In a community speaker's case, an LLM asked to write alt text for a product image of a veterinary anxiety medicine for cats described only what it could see, a cat and a veterinarian, and dropped the stress, anxiety and medical-treatment intent of the page.
extendsDocs D2-C462 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.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.
- Stage D2-C952 Day 2 · Lightning session F: Media
A community speaker warned that articles still recommend rewriting alt text with AI, called AI a tool, and said that adopting such new AI implementations without applying existing SEO knowledge can damage ranking performance.
extendsDocs D2-C462 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.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.
- Stage D3-C324 Day 3 · How Search results are born
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.
extendsStage D2-C521 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.
- Stage D3-C337 Day 3 · How Search results are born
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.
extendsStage D2-C454 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.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).
- Stage D3-C365 Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google added six Merchant Center feed attributes for AI shopping experiences: question and answer, documents, related products, item group title and variant option for variants, and popularity rank.
extendsStage D2-C509 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.
- Stage D3-C378 Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google Shopping called rich data with light structure the AI sweet spot: a little structure that helps the AI system understand the data, not deep, highly nested, complex structures.
extendsStage D2-C489 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.
- Stage D3-C383 Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
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.
extendsStage D2-C505 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.
- Stage D3-C396 Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
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.
extendsStage D2-C506 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.
- Stage D3-C647 Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
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.
extendsStage D2-C500 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.
- Stage D3-C686 Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Hallucinations can happen with any AI model, and with current training methods there is no way to get rid of them.
extendsDocs D2-C462 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.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.
- Stage D3-C329 Day 3 · How Search results are born
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.
repeatsD2-C490 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.
- Stage D3-C405 Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
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.
repeatsD2-C469 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.