What is structured data (schema.org)?
Short answer: Structured data is machine-readable metadata added to a page via schema.org markup (JSON-LD format). It tells search engines and AI crawlers what the page is about — a product, an article, a FAQ, an organization, a recipe. Pages with rich structured data are cited by LLMs more often and more accurately than pages without it.
Structured data is a standardized way of describing the content of a webpage so machines can understand it without parsing the HTML. The most widely-used vocabulary is schema.org, which defines types like Product, Article, FAQPage, Organization, Recipe, Event, and hundreds more.
There are three syntaxes: JSON-LD (recommended — embedded in a <script> tag), Microdata (inline HTML attributes), and RDFa (inline HTML attributes). JSON-LD is preferred because it is invisible to users, easy to maintain, and accepted by all major search engines.
A FAQPage example in JSON-LD:
```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [{ "@type": "Question", "name": "What is your return policy?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "We accept returns within 30 days." } }] } ```
For LLMs, structured data is the difference between an answer that cites your page and an answer that ignores it. ChatGPT, Claude, and Claude extract structured data first, then fall back to HTML parsing. If your FAQ is wrapped in schema.org, it can be quoted verbatim. If it is wrapped only in <div> tags, the LLM has to guess the Q&A pairs from the prose — and often guesses wrong.
ShortcutSistem's Omni Audit checks for the seven most important schema.org types (Organization, FAQPage, Article, Product, BreadcrumbList, WebSite, LocalBusiness) on every scan.