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Schema (Structured Data)

Code-level metadata embedded in a webpage that tells search engines and AI engines what the content represents — an article, a person, a product, a dataset, a frequently-asked question, an organization.

Also called: Schema Markup, Structured Data

Common prompts: "what is schema," "schema markup for AI," "do AI engines read schema"

Definition

Schema is structured metadata embedded in a webpage's HTML — typically using the Schema.org vocabulary — that describes the page's content to crawlers in machine-readable form. Schema tells the engine what kind of content the page contains: an article, a product, a review, a person, a recipe, a comparison.

Why it matters

AI engines read schema as a primary signal of content type and quality. Pages with proper Article, Product, Review, FAQ, and HowTo schema get retrieved more reliably than identically-written pages without it. Schema is the most leverage-able technical input in the Brand AI Crawl Layer — small investment, durable retrieval improvement. Schema is communications now, not just SEO infrastructure.

Example

A consumer beauty brand adds Product, Review, and FAQ schema to its 30 highest-traffic product pages. Within 90 days, citation surface on those products in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews increases by an average of 22%. The page content did not change. The machine-readable layer did.

Where it's used

Related terms

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