Schema.org — Meaning Embedded in the Page

Schema.org was founded in 2011 by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex to give websites a shared vocabulary for describing people, organisations, articles, events, products and many other kinds of information. It is now developed through an open process involving a steering group, GitHub and the W3C Schema.org Community Group.

Schema.org is neither a separate text file nor a form of HTML. It is a vocabulary that can be expressed inside a web page using JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa. JSON-LD is commonly placed in a <script type="application/ld+json"> element, while Microdata and RDFa add attributes to HTML elements. Schema.org documents all three formats, and Google recommends JSON-LD for structured data used by Search.

Adoption by websites and search engines is substantial. Google uses supported structured data to understand pages and produce features such as rich search results. This is strong evidence of use in search, but it should not automatically be treated as evidence that generative AI systems or real-time AI retrieval bots interpret every Schema.org property.

Schema.org also differs technically from the URL-based messengers. A bot receives the structured data as part of the page itself, so server logs cannot record a separate “Schema.org visit.” They can show that the page was requested, but not whether its structured data was detected, understood or applied. Testing that question therefore requires controlled content experiments rather than counting requests to a distinct file.