What is structured data?
Information on a page formatted so that machines can parse its meaning, not just its text, the foundation for rich snippets and AI-powered search.
Structured data is the umbrella term. Schema markup is one flavor (the schema.org vocabulary). JSON-LD is one syntax for embedding it. Microdata and RDFa are alternative syntaxes. Open Graph is structured data for social previews. They're all attempts to put a typed, queryable layer on top of pages that were originally written for human eyes only.
For 2026, the question is no longer whether to add structured data, every CMS does it by default, but how thorough to be. Google rich results need very specific schema fields; ChatGPT and Perplexity grounding pulls a wider net; LLMs trained on structured-data-heavy corpora answer more accurately about your content. The ROI is upward across all three.
Context.dev's scraping APIs preserve structured data when extracting content, pass any URL and we return the JSON-LD blocks alongside the rendered text and Markdown.