Structured Data
Last updated September 2026
Structured data is standardized code, most commonly Schema.org markup in JSON-LD format, added to a webpage to label its content explicitly for machines: this is a product, this is its price, this is a review, this is an FAQ. It is how search engines and AI systems parse a page's meaning with certainty instead of inference.
Structured data does not change what a human visitor sees. It labels the same content for machines reading the page, so a search engine can display rich results and an AI system can extract a clean fact instead of guessing from surrounding prose.
01
What structured data actually does
02
Common schema types agencies use
- 01
Organization and LocalBusiness, for entity basics
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Product and Review, for ecommerce rich results
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FAQPage and HowTo, for question-and-answer content
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Article and BreadcrumbList, for content and site structure
- 05
DefinedTerm, for glossary and definition content
03
Why it's foundational to AEO and GEO
An AI system extracting an answer trusts a clearly labeled fact more readily than one it has to infer from paragraph text. Structured data is the most direct lever a site controls for machine-readability, more direct than writing style or backlinks alone.
Conduit adds relevant schema as a standard part of technical SEO builds, not an optional upsell, treating it as baseline infrastructure the same way clean HTML or a sitemap is baseline.
04
A common misconception
Adding a schema plugin and calling structured data done is one of the more common half-measures agencies inherit from a previous vendor. A site can have FAQPage markup on every blog post while the actual page content buries the answer three paragraphs deep, or Organization schema listing a phone number that does not match what appears on the page itself. Structured data has to describe what is actually, visibly true on the page, not what a template auto-generates. Google and AI systems that catch a mismatch between marked-up data and on-page content do not just ignore the bad markup, they can discount the trustworthiness of the whole page's structured data going forward, which makes a sloppy implementation worse than no implementation at all. A quick audit before assuming schema is handled: pull the page into Google's Rich Results Test and confirm the markup matches the visible content field for field, not just that it validates without errors.
