SEO & Metadata
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.
Brand.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.
How Brand.dev uses structured data
Endpoints in the Brand.dev API where this concept comes up directly.
FAQ
Is structured data worth the effort?
For commerce, content, and local pages: yes. The CTR uplift from rich results, plus the AI-overview surface area, plus the LLM-grounding benefit, easily clears the cost of adding it.
How do I test structured data?
Google's Rich Results Test for SERP rendering, Schema.org's validator for spec compliance, and your own browser's view-source for sanity.
What's the difference between structured and unstructured data?
Structured data has a schema, defined types, named fields, predictable nesting. Unstructured data is raw text, images, video, audio, meaningful only after a model interprets it.
Related terms
Structured data added to a page using the schema.org vocabulary so search engines can understand its meaning and show rich results.
JSON for Linking Data, a way to embed schema.org structured data into a page using plain JSON in a `<script type="application/ld+json">` block.
An HTML element in the `<head>` that supplies metadata about the page, title, description, viewport, social previews, robots directives.
A meta-tag protocol Facebook introduced in 2010 that tells social platforms how to render a link preview, title, description, image, and type.