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Definition

Schema.org

Schema.org is a shared vocabulary of types and properties — Article, Person, FAQPage, DefinedTerm and hundreds of others — for describing what a web page is about in a form machines can read. Founded in 2011 by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex, it is maintained in the open through a W3C community group and can be written as JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa.

Before Schema.org, each search engine published its own markup guidance and site owners had to pick between competing vocabularies. The launch in June 2011 gave the major engines one vocabulary to point at. Since April 2015 changes have been proposed and discussed in the W3C Schema.org Community Group, and new releases appear several times a year.

The vocabulary is a hierarchy: every type descends from Thing, so a TechArticle is also an Article and a CreativeWork, and inherits their properties. The types that matter for being cited by an answer engine are a short list:

  • Article and TechArticle, with author, datePublished, dateModified and citation
  • Person and Organization, with sameAs links to profiles that establish who the author is
  • FAQPage with Question and Answer pairs
  • DefinedTerm and DefinedTermSet for glossary entries
  • SpeakableSpecification to point at the passage that is the answer

Schema.org defines the meaning; it says nothing about how the markup is encoded. Google supports JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa and recommends JSON-LD. Property definitions live at predictable URLs (for example https://schema.org/citation), which is the fastest way to check what a property expects before you emit it. The guide on structured data for AI answers covers which properties to fill and how to keep them in sync with the visible page.

Frequently asked questions

Does Schema.org markup improve rankings or citations?

Google documents structured data as a way to become eligible for rich results and to help Search understand a page, not as a general ranking factor. No AI vendor has published how its retrieval system weights it. Treat Schema.org as disambiguation — it removes doubt about what a passage is and who wrote it — rather than as a lever that moves a bad page up.

Related terms

Guides that use this term

  • Structured data

    Structured data for AI answers: the schema.org types that matter

    Structured data for AI answers is JSON-LD that labels what a page contains: Article or TechArticle for provenance (author, datePublished, dateModified, citation), FAQPage for question–answer pairs, DefinedTerm for definitions, Person with sameAs for authors, BreadcrumbList and WebSite for context, and SpeakableSpecification for the direct answer. Google requires no markup for AI features; its value is removing ambiguity, so generate it from the CMS fields that render the visible text.

    9 min read