Structured Data
Machine-readable annotations on web pages - JSON-LD, microdata, RDFa.
Information organized in a formatted, machine-readable way that helps search engines and AI systems understand the content and context of web pages. Also known as Schema Markup or Semantic Markup, structured data is the substrate AI engines parse to ground their answers in facts rather than inferring them from prose.
Structured data is one of the highest-leverage signals for AI visibility because it removes ambiguity. Instead of forcing an AI system to infer that a string is a price, a date, an author, or a rating, schema markup labels each element explicitly. That clarity helps AI search engines and language models interpret a page correctly, summarize it accurately, and decide whether to cite it. As search shifts from keyword matching toward answer generation, pages that declare their meaning in machine-readable form are easier to ground, quote, and represent faithfully in AI-generated answers.
- Product and pricing dataMarking up prices, availability, and specifications so AI shopping assistants read them as structured fields instead of guessing from prose.
- Articles and FAQsDeclaring headlines, authors, dates, and question-answer pairs so AI engines can extract the answer and attribute it to the right source.
- Organization and entity factsPublishing consistent details about a company, person, or product so AI systems resolve the entity correctly and connect it to the right knowledge graph node.
AI systems parse structured data as explicit, labeled facts rather than free text they have to interpret. When a page declares its entities and relationships in a format like JSON-LD, the model can map those facts directly, which supports more consistent understanding and more accurate summaries. Well-formed structured data increases the chance that content is quoted or cited correctly, while missing or inconsistent markup leaves the system to infer meaning from the surrounding prose.
Knowing the term is step one.
Geordy operationalizes every term in this glossary - generating the structured files AI engines actually read.