What is structured data?
Structured data is a layer of labels added to a web page that tells machines what the content means rather than just what it says. A page about a film can state, in a format search engines read, that this is a VideoObject with this title, this duration, this thumbnail and this upload date. A product page can declare its price, availability and rating. An article can name its author and publication date. A glossary entry can carry its questions and answers as an FAQPage.
The vocabulary comes from schema.org, a shared standard maintained by the major search engines, and it is most often written as a block of JSON-LD in the page head, invisible to visitors. Older formats, microdata and RDFa, wrap the labels around the visible HTML instead. Either way, the page looks the same to a person and far clearer to a crawler.
Why it matters
Why structured data matters
Search engines can infer a lot from plain text, but inference is slow and sometimes wrong. Structured data removes the guesswork, and the reward is rich results: star ratings beneath a listing, a recipe card, an event date, a video thumbnail, a fold-out set of questions, a knowledge panel built from a brand's own declared facts. Those results take more space on the page and get more clicks than a plain blue link, and they are only available to pages that have told the engine what they contain.
It also feeds the systems beyond the results page. Voice assistants, AI answers and shopping surfaces all draw on structured data, so a site that marks up its content is legible to whatever reads the web next.
In practice
How structured data works in practice
- 01
The work starts by matching each page type to the right schema: Organization for the brand, Article for posts, VideoObject for films, Product for items, FAQPage for questions, BreadcrumbList for navigation. Most content management systems and SEO plugins generate the basic set, and custom templates add the rest. The markup is then tested with Google's Rich Results Test, which shows what the engine sees and flags errors, and Search Console reports which rich results the site is earning and which are failing.
- 02
The rules are strict. The structured data must match what is visible on the page; marking up a rating the visitor cannot see is a violation. Required fields have to be present, images need minimum sizes, and some rich results, such as FAQ, are now only shown for certain kinds of site. Structured data is maintained like any code, re-tested after template changes and watched for the day a schema type is retired.
At RIOT
Structured data at RIOT
Every page in this glossary carries structured data. The questions at the foot of each entry are marked up as an FAQPage, so the fold-out questions a visitor sees are the same ones a search engine can read. It is the plainest example of the rule: the page says what it is, in a form both people and machines can trust.
Watch out
What people get wrong about structured data
Expecting markup to improve rankings directly. It does not; it changes how a result looks and what features it is eligible for. The next mistake is marking up things that are not on the page, which can earn a manual action for spammy structured data. And many sites add the markup once and never test it again, so a template change silently breaks the rich result they were counting on.
