structured data
Information on a web page marked up using a shared vocabulary, usually schema.org, so machines (search engines, AI assistants, social cards) can understand what the page is about.
Also known as: schema markup, structured markup, machine-readable markup
Structured data is the difference between a web page that asks a machine to figure out what it is about, and a web page that tells it.
A page selling a Class V receiver hitch can either describe the product in marketing prose and hope the parser extracts the price and availability, or it can ship a JSON-LD block that declares @type: Product with price: 249.00, availability: InStock, and so on. The first version makes the AI engine guess. The second hands it the answer.
For data on how common the gap is across real business pages, see our analysis of 2,174 crawled pages (93.9% had no structured data of any kind).
Related terms
JSON-LD
A lightweight JSON format for marking up structured data on web pages. The format Google recommends and the one AI assistants parse most reliably.
schema.org
An open vocabulary for describing entities (businesses, products, events, people) on the web in a machine-readable way. Co-founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex in 2011.
AI visibility
How AI assistants describe, recommend, or cite your business when a user asks a relevant question. The thing GeoReputation measures.