What Is Schema Markup, and Is It Still Worth It?
Schema markup - structured data - is machine-readable description added to a page: this is an article, this is its author, this is the publication date. The Schema Markup Generator produces it as JSON-LD.
How it is added
Three formats exist and JSON-LD is the one to use. It sits in a script tag in the head or body, separate from your visible markup, which means adding or changing it does not touch your layout. Google recommends it explicitly.
The older alternatives, Microdata and RDFa, interleave attributes with your HTML and are considerably more painful to maintain.
What it buys you has changed
Be clear about this, because most articles on the subject are out of date. Structured data earns rich results - the stars, prices, images and extra lines that make a result stand out - but Google has withdrawn several types that used to work.
FAQ rich results were sharply restricted in 2023 and have since been retired for ordinary sites. HowTo results went the same way. Google has continued trimming the set, so the honest position is that adding FAQ markup today will not get you an expanded result, whatever an older guide says.
What still reliably produces rich results includes Product with price and availability, Recipe, Review and aggregate ratings, Event, LocalBusiness, Breadcrumb and Article. Google's own rich results documentation and its Rich Results Test are the authority, they change, and checking them beats trusting any article including this one.
Why it is still worth adding
Two reasons that survive the withdrawals.
Breadcrumbs and Article markup still change how results look - the breadcrumb path instead of a bare URL, correct dates and authorship.
And it describes your page unambiguously. A search engine parsing your prose has to infer that a number is a price and a string is an author. Structured data states it. That matters more now that AI-generated summaries and assistants read pages, because they benefit from the same clarity - and the clearest statement of what your page contains is the one you wrote in JSON.
The rule that gets sites penalised
The markup must describe what is actually on the page, visible to a reader. Marking up reviews you do not display, prices that are not there, or an FAQ nobody can see is a structured data violation and can cost you rich results across the whole site.
Common questions
Does schema markup improve rankings?
Not directly, and Google has said so. It affects presentation, and a better-looking result earns more clicks.
Which type should I use for a blog post?
Article, or BlogPosting. Keep the dates accurate - a dateModified that does not match reality is worse than none.
How do I check it works?
Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup validator. Both show what was parsed and what was rejected.
Is FAQ markup worth adding now?
Not for a rich result. FAQ content on the page is still worth having for readers.
Need structured data for a page?