Schema Markup
Also known as: Structured data
In short
Schema markup is structured data, following the shared vocabulary published at schema.org, that is added to a webpage's code to explicitly label what its content means — such as a business, a service, a review or a question and answer — so search engines and AI systems can parse it reliably.
Without markup, a machine reading a page has to infer meaning from layout and text alone, which is error-prone. Schema markup removes the guesswork by tagging, for example, exactly which text is a business's phone number, which paragraph answers a specific question, or which figure is a product's price, using a shared vocabulary maintained collaboratively by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex through schema.org. It is most commonly implemented as JSON-LD, a block of structured data embedded in a page's code that is invisible to visitors but readable by machines.
Common types used by service businesses include Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList and Review. Correctly implemented schema can produce enhanced results in Google Search (such as star ratings or FAQ dropdowns) and materially improves the odds that an AI answer engine extracts a business's facts correctly rather than relying on a stale directory listing.
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