What is Schema.org

What they do

Schema.org publishes and evolves a type-and-property vocabulary that describes real-world things and content. Search engines map this vocabulary to features like rich results, and AI systems use it as high-confidence structured context about a page.

• A vocabulary of types: Article, Product, LocalBusiness, FAQPage and more
• JSON-LD: the recommended way to embed the markup
• The basis for many Google rich results and knowledge features
• A backbone signal for entity understanding in search and AI

Why they matter for your site

Correct Schema.org markup can unlock rich results in Google, clarify your entity to search engines, and give AI systems explicit, machine-readable facts about your content. Done wrong or over-claimed, it can also trigger manual actions, so accuracy matters.

How REO Rank works with their standards

We implement Schema.org in JSON-LD across the page types that benefit — organisations, articles, products, FAQs, breadcrumbs and more — validate it against Google's requirements, and use it deliberately to strengthen entity and AI-search signals rather than as decoration.

Why it matters

Schema.org is a collaborative, community-driven vocabulary of structured-data types and properties for describing content on the web in a way machines understand — and it is the shared standard behind the structured data that powers rich results and helps search engines and AI interpret pages as entities. It matters because it was founded by the major search engines (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and later Yandex) specifically so there would be one common vocabulary for marking up content, rather than each engine inventing its own. When you add "structured data" for SEO, you are almost always using Schema.org types.

• A community vocabulary for describing web content so machines understand it
• The shared standard behind structured data, rich results and entity understanding
• Founded by the major search engines for one common markup vocabulary

How it works

Schema.org defines a large hierarchy of types (Thing, then Product, Article, Person, Organization, Event, LocalBusiness, FAQPage and hundreds more) each with defined properties, so you can describe a page's content in a standardised, machine-readable way. That markup is added to pages — most commonly as JSON-LD, Google's preferred format — and search engines read it to understand the content and to enable rich results. Because it is a shared standard maintained collaboratively and supported across search engines, marking up with Schema.org makes your content interpretable by all of them at once, rather than in a proprietary format only one understands.

• A large type hierarchy (Product, Article, Organization, Event, FAQ, etc.) with properties
• Describes page content in a standardised, machine-readable way
• Added to pages (usually as JSON-LD) and read by search engines
• A shared standard supported across engines, not a proprietary format

In practice

When implementing structured data, you choose the Schema.org type that matches the page (Product for a product page, Article for a blog post, FAQPage for a FAQ), mark up the content that is genuinely present, and validate it. Google supports a specific subset of Schema.org types for rich results and documents which properties it needs, so in practice you follow Google's structured-data documentation for eligibility while using the Schema.org vocabulary underneath. The distinction is worth knowing: Schema.org is the vocabulary (the shared language); Google's guidelines specify which parts of it it uses and how — you speak Schema.org, and Google tells you which sentences it rewards.

• Match the Schema.org type to the page and mark up real content
• Use JSON-LD and validate with the Rich Results Test
• Follow Google's docs for which types/properties enable rich results
• Schema.org is the vocabulary; Google's guidelines specify what it uses