Structured data: what earns something and what does not

Schema markup does not improve rankings. Google has been consistent about this and there is no credible evidence otherwise.

What it does is make you eligible for rich results — the stars, prices, availability, FAQs and images that change how a result looks. And how a result looks changes click-through rate, which is worth having for reasons unrelated to ranking.

What reliably earns something

Product — price, availability and review stars in results. For e-commerce this is the highest-value markup by a distance.

Review and AggregateRating — the stars, where genuinely earned and correctly attached to the thing being reviewed.

Recipe, Event, JobPosting — each unlocks specific and prominent result formats.

Breadcrumb — replaces the URL in the result with a readable path. Small, reliable, easy.

Organization and LocalBusiness — feeds knowledge panels and helps entity resolution. Not visible directly, still worth having.

What earns nothing

Article markup on an ordinary blog post, most of the time. It is not harmful; it just rarely changes anything visible.

FAQ markup. In August 2023 Google restricted FAQ rich results to well-known authoritative government and health sites. Everyone else's FAQ blocks still validate and no longer display. A great deal of effort went into markup that now shows nothing.

WebSite / WebPage on every page. Harmless, inert.

Markup for things you do not actually have. Review stars on a page with no reviews is a guideline violation and the sort of thing that earns a manual action.

Getting it right

Use JSON-LD in the head. It is Google's stated preference and it does not entangle markup with layout.

Mark up what is actually on the page, visible to the user. Hidden markup describing things a visitor cannot see is the line between structured data and spam.

Validate with the Rich Results Test, which tells you what you are eligible for, rather than a generic schema validator, which tells you whether the syntax parses.

The honest expectation

For most content sites, structured data is a small, cheap improvement to how results look. For e-commerce, local businesses and anything with reviews or events, it is close to essential.

Deploying it everywhere and expecting rankings to move is the mistake, and it is a common one.