Intro to How Structured Data Markup Works | Google Search Central  |  Documentation  |  Google for Developers (original) (raw)

Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search

Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

Why add structured data to a page?

Adding structured data can enable search results that are more engaging to users and might encourage them to interact more with your website, which are called rich results. Here are some case studies of websites that have implemented structured data for their site:

• Rotten Tomatoes added structured data to 100,000 unique pages and measured a 25% higher click-through rate for pages enhanced with structured data, compared to pages without structured data.
• The Food Network has converted 80% of their pages to enable search features, and has seen a 35% increase in visits.
• Rakuten has found that users spend 1.5x more time on pages that implemented structured data than on non-structured data pages, and have a 3.6x higher interaction rate on AMP pages with search features vs non-feature AMP pages.
• Nestlé has measured pages that show as rich results in search have an 82% higher click through rate than non-rich result pages.

Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general, such as information about the people, books, or companies that are included in the markup. For example, when a recipe page has JSON-LD structured data (describing the title of the recipe, the author of the recipe, and other details), Google Search can use that information to display a rich result for the recipe:

Because the structured data labels each individual element of the recipe, users can search for your recipe by ingredient, calorie count, cook time, and so on.

Structured data is coded using in-page markup on the page that the information applies to. The structured data on the page describes the content of that page. Don't create blank or empty pages just to hold structured data, and don't add structured data about information that is not visible to the user, even if the information is accurate. For more technical and quality guidelines, see the Structured data general guidelines.

The Rich Results Test is an easy and useful tool for validating your structured data, and in some cases, previewing a feature in Google Search. Try it out:

Structured data vocabulary and format

This documentation describes which properties are required, recommended, or optional for structured data with special meaning to Google Search. Most Search structured data usesschema.org vocabulary, but you should rely on the Google Search Central documentation as definitive for Google Search behavior, rather than the schema.org documentation. There are more attributes and objects on schema.org that aren't required by Google Search; they may be useful for other search engines, services, tools, and platforms.

Be sure to check your structured data using the Rich Results Test during development, and theRich result status reports after deployment, to monitor the validity of your pages, which might break after deployment due to templating or serving issues.

You must include all the required properties for an object to be eligible for appearance in Google Search with enhanced display. In general, defining more recommended features can make it more likely that your information can appear in Search results with enhanced display.However, it is more important to supply fewer but complete and accurate recommended properties rather than trying to provide every possible recommended property with less complete, badly-formed, or inaccurate data.

In addition to the properties and objects documented here, Google can make general use of thesameAs property and otherschema.org structured data. Some of these elements may be used to enable future Search features, if they are deemed useful.

Supported formats

Google Search supports structured data in the following formats, unless documented otherwise. In general, we recommend using a format that's easiest for you to implement and maintain (in most cases, that's JSON-LD); all 3 formats are equally fine for Google, as long as the markup is valid and properly implemented per the feature's documentation.