Schema markup for SEO: how to use Schema.org tags

Schema.org tags are created so that search engines can understand the content of a page. They work by attaching an agreed meaning to specific pieces of text, in a form that machines can read. The vocabulary is recognized by the major search engines, including Google, Bing and Yahoo. Competitors rarely help each other, but Schema.org is a case of exactly that kind of cooperation. What you get is an agreed set of code markers that tells the most popular search engines what the data on your site means.

Some history about Schema.org

Schema.org is an initiative launched on June 2, 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo to create and maintain a shared set of structured data tags for websites. Yandex joined in November 2011. The initiative offers the schema.org vocabulary together with three formats, Microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD, for marking up the content of a page with metadata about itself. Such a tag can be recognized by search engine robots and parsers, so it gives them access to the meaning of a page, not just its words. The initiative also defines an extension mechanism for adding new properties.

What are the Schema.org tags?

They are pieces of code on your website that help search engines show more detailed results to users. Schema.org maintains a large vocabulary that the major search engines recognize. It covers most things that can be identified, from entities such as people, organizations, products and places to the relations between those entities and their actions. The tags tell search engines what the data means. Your content is indexed and shown in search results either way, but with tags, some of it can be understood more precisely and displayed in a richer form.

They use a unique semantic dictionary, and you do not need new programming skills to apply it. Pages with tags are still ordinary HTML pages. Schema.org supports three formats:

JSON-LD: a separate block of code in a script tag of type application/ld+json, placed in the head or the body of the page. It does not touch the visible HTML, which makes it the easiest format to maintain, and Google recommends it.
Microdata: attributes such as itemscope, itemtype and itemprop added to existing HTML elements. This is the format this post described when it first appeared in 2019.
RDFa: a similar set of HTML attributes, used mostly where linked data is already in place.

JSON-LD has become the default. In the October 2024 Common Crawl, the Web Data Commons project found structured data on 1.3 billion of 2.4 billion HTML pages, and 70% of the websites that use structured data used JSON-LD.

Schema.org tags work for almost every type of content. There are types for articles, local businesses, restaurants, TV episodes, book reviews, movies, software applications, events and products, among hundreds of others. If your site holds any kind of data, there is a good chance that a type exists for it.

Do sites with schema tags rank better? A Searchmetrics study from 2014 found that pages with Schema.org markup ranked on average four positions higher than pages without it, and that just over a third of Google results showed rich snippets based on it. The authors themselves warned that this was a correlation, not proof that the markup caused the higher positions. Google does not treat structured data as a ranking factor: it presents it as a way to understand a page and to qualify for rich results, and even a manual action for spammy markup removes rich result eligibility without changing how the page ranks.

What schema markup does for SEO

Schema markup works in three ways. First, it makes a page eligible for rich results: star ratings, prices and stock status, event dates, recipe times, breadcrumbs or a video thumbnail shown with the listing. Google decides whether to show them, and correct markup does not guarantee it.

Second, rich results tend to earn more clicks. Google’s documentation quotes case studies: Rotten Tomatoes added structured data to 100,000 pages and measured a 25% higher click-through rate on them, Food Network converted 80% of its pages and saw 35% more visits, and Nestlé measured an 82% higher click-through rate for pages shown as rich results. These are company-reported figures rather than controlled experiments, but they all point the same way.

Third, it removes guesswork about entities. Google uses structured data to collect information about people, books, companies and other things, and that information can feed the knowledge panels shown next to results. Organization markup with your logo, contact details and sameAs links to your official profiles helps search engines connect your brand name to one specific company.

Types of schema markup that Google supports

How many types of schema markup are there? Schema.org defines 826 types and 1,540 properties, but only a small part of them changes anything visible in Google. In October 2026 Google’s search gallery lists about 25 features. These are the ones most sites use:

Organization: name, logo, contact details and official profiles. It can shape the knowledge panel for a brand.
LocalBusiness and its subtypes, such as Restaurant, Dentist or Bakery: address, opening hours and phone number.
Product: price, availability, shipping and return policy on pages where people can buy (merchant listings), or ratings and pros and cons on review pages that do not sell.
Review snippet and AggregateRating: star ratings. They must come from real users, and in July 2026 Google added a guideline against fake and undisclosed incentivized reviews.
Article: headline, author, publication and update dates, and image.
BreadcrumbList: the page’s place in the site hierarchy. Since January 2025, breadcrumbs appear in desktop results only.
Event: date, venue and tickets. Since June 2025, only events held at a physical location and bookable by the public qualify.
Recipe, VideoObject, JobPosting, Course list, Dataset, Q&A and Discussion forum, for sites that publish those kinds of content.

The list shrinks as well as grows. In August 2023 Google limited FAQ rich results to well-known government and health sites and in September 2023 it stopped showing HowTo rich results. FAQ rich results disappeared from Google Search for all sites on May 7, 2026. In 2025 Google also retired course info, estimated salary, learning video, special announcement and vehicle listing markup. Keeping these types on a page does no harm, and other systems may still read them, but they no longer earn a rich result in Google.

An example of schema markup in JSON-LD

Here is what a minimal JSON-LD block for a small bakery contains. It sits inside a script tag of type application/ld+json, anywhere in the HTML of the page:

"@context": "https://schema.org" says which vocabulary the block uses.
"@type": "Bakery" picks the most specific type that fits. Bakery is one of the LocalBusiness subtypes.
"name": "Maple Street Bakery", "telephone" and "url" give the basic facts.
"address" holds a nested PostalAddress object with streetAddress, addressLocality, postalCode and addressCountry.
"openingHours": "Mo-Sa 07:00-18:00" states the hours in a form that machines can parse.
"sameAs" lists the URLs of the bakery’s official profiles, so search engines can tie them to the same business.

The same facts must appear on the page itself. A product block works the same way, with name, brand, sku and a nested Offer that carries the price, the currency and the availability.

How to add Schema.org tags to your website

The goal of every business is a better position, a better-looking result and more clicks from search. There are three practical routes. A content management system often covers the basics: Google notes that users of Wix, WordPress or Shopify can usually add structured data through a settings page or a plugin, and WordPress plugins such as Yoast SEO add Organization and Article markup on their own. For anything custom, write the JSON-LD by hand or generate it; AI assistants do this well, as long as you validate the result. The third route, which this post described in 2019, is Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper:

Open the Structured Data Markup Helper.
Select the type of data you want to mark up, for example Articles, Local Businesses, Products or Events.
Paste the URL of the page or article you want to mark up, or its HTML.
Highlight elements on the page and assign them to properties: the title, the author, the date, the price.
Keep adding tags. Use the list of data items as a guide and select other elements of the page.
Create the code. When you finish, click “Create HTML”. The tool generates the markup as JSON-LD, or as Microdata placed into your HTML.
Add the markup to your website. Paste the JSON-LD block into the page template in your CMS, or into the source code if you do not use a CMS. With Microdata, copy the highlighted fragments into the right places, or download the generated HTML file.
Test the result in Google’s Rich Results Test before you publish. It shows which rich results the page qualifies for and previews some of them. The Structured Data Testing Tool that this step used in 2019 no longer exists: Google retired it, and schema.org now runs its successor, the Schema Markup Validator.

One technical detail matters more in 2026 than it did in 2019: put the JSON-LD into the HTML that the server sends, not only through JavaScript or a tag manager. Google renders JavaScript, but in a December 2024 analysis Vercel found that none of the major AI crawlers, including those of OpenAI and Anthropic, render it. Markup added in the browser is invisible to them.

How to check if your website has schema markup

There are four quick ways to see what markup a page carries and whether it works:

Rich Results Test: enter a URL or a piece of code and it lists the detected items, errors and warnings, but only for types that produce Google rich results.
Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org): checks any schema.org markup, including types Google does not use.
Google Search Console: the rich result reports and the URL Inspection tool show which items Google found on your live pages and which have errors, across the whole site.
The page source: search the HTML for application/ld+json, itemscope or typeof to find JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa.

To measure the effect, Google suggests a simple test. Pick a few pages without structured data that have stable, non-seasonal traffic and months of Search Console history. Add markup, confirm with URL Inspection that Google detects it, then compare their performance over a few months with similar pages you left unchanged.

Tips for using Schema tags

Most of these rules come from Schema.org’s and Google’s own guidelines:

Start with the types that are most commonly used and fit your business. Google’s search gallery shows which of them produce visible results.
Use the most specific type that fits: Restaurant rather than LocalBusiness, BlogPosting or NewsArticle rather than Article.
Mark up more, but completely. Schema.org’s guide says: “In general, the more content you mark up, the better.” Google adds a condition: a few complete and accurate recommended properties beat many incomplete ones, and items without the required properties do not qualify for rich results at all.
Mark up only content that is visible to visitors. In Schema.org’s words, you “should mark up only the content that is visible to people who visit the web page”, not content in hidden divs or other hidden page elements. Google can answer hidden or misleading markup with a manual action.
Keep the markup in sync with the page. Prices, stock and opening hours change, and Google’s guidance for AI search asks site owners to make sure structured data matches the visible text.
Do not invent ratings. Reviews and ratings must come from real users; fake ones can cost a site its rich results.
Keep one identity for your organization: the same name, logo and sameAs links in your markup, your Google Business Profile and your social profiles.

Schema markup and AI search

Since 2024 many searches come with an AI answer, and the question site owners ask is whether schema helps there. The official answers differ. Google says there is no special schema.org structured data you need to add to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and its advice is the same as for search. Microsoft is more positive: in October 2025 a Bing product manager wrote that schema “helps search engines and AI systems understand your content” and named product, review, FAQ and event markup as examples.

In practice, markup helps AI answers indirectly. Systems that build their answers on a search index, such as Google’s and Bing’s, work with the facts that the index extracted from your markup: the price, the opening hours, the author, the company behind the brand. Other AI assistants document little about how they treat markup, so for them it is mostly more text on the page. That makes clean Organization, Product and Article markup a sensible part of adapting to how AI changes search, but not a shortcut into AI answers.

Schema.org now and in the future

The idea of a web infrastructure that needs structured data to describe entities and their relations in the real world is as old as the web itself. Describing the world as a network of typed relations was well known in the 1970s, and logical statements about the world have a history that predates computers. It is surprising how hard it was for such seemingly obvious ideas to find their place on the web as an information platform.

When this post first appeared in 2019, schema.org was almost eight years old and entering a new phase, in which the vocabulary was developed in a more distributed way, with extensions for topics from cars to product details. In that model schema.org itself is the core: a shared vocabulary and a forum for agreeing on it. That is still how it works; in September 2026 the vocabulary was on version 30.

The interest in big data made common schemas more necessary, and AI has made them more necessary still. Search engines, shopping assistants and AI agents all need to read prices, availability, return policies and business details from many sources in one consistent form, which is what a shared vocabulary provides.

In 2019 it was surprising how few companies used schema.org tags. That has changed: by the Web Data Commons count, about half of the pages in the Common Crawl sample now carry some structured data. Having markup is no longer an advantage in itself, but complete and correct markup on the pages that matter still is. It’s worth learning and implementing the right markup to improve your search results.