Structured data

Structured data is code added to a page that describes what the page is about in a format machines expect. The visible page says your opening hours in a sentence. The structured data says the same hours in labelled fields, so nothing has to be inferred. The vocabulary almost everybody uses is schema.org, which is why the same thing gets called schema markup.

In short

• It restates the page’s facts in a labelled format machines can read.
• It does not raise rankings directly, and it can change how you appear.
• Several features it used to unlock have been withdrawn, FAQ among them.
• Markup that disagrees with the visible page is treated as spam.

What it is actually for

A search engine reading your page has to work out what everything means. That your business is a clinic. That the number near the top is a phone number and not a licence. That the range of digits is opening hours. It is usually right, and usually is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Structured data removes the guessing. It hands over the same facts already labelled: this is the name, this is the address, this is the price, this is the rating. Nothing on the page looks different to a person. Everything is easier for a machine.

What it gets you, and what it does not

This is where expectations go wrong, so it is worth being blunt.

• It does not raise your ranking directly. Google has said so plainly and repeatedly. A page does not move up because it carries markup.
• It can change how you look in the results, through stars, prices, availability, breadcrumbs and similar extras.
• It can lift clicks at the same position, which is what people are usually noticing when they say it worked.
• It makes your facts harder to get wrong, which matters more as answers get summarised by machines rather than read by people.
• It is not a substitute for the page. Markup describing a thin page describes a thin page.

The features that went away

A lot of advice about structured data is describing a search results page that no longer exists, and this is the part most worth updating.

FAQ markup used to produce a dropdown of questions under your result. Google restricted that to well-known government and health sites in 2023, then retired the feature in search entirely in May 2026. How-to markup was dropped in 2023 as well. Several other types have narrowed quietly.

None of this makes the markup invalid. It remains part of schema.org, it is still read by other search engines, and AI crawlers still consume it. What has gone is the visible reward in Google, so anybody adding FAQ markup today expecting the dropdown is working from old instructions.

The types that still earn their place

For a small business the useful list is short.

• Organisation, stating who you are, with your logo and your profiles elsewhere.
• Local business, adding the address, the hours and the service area. Most Philippine businesses should have this and do not, and it should agree with the Google Business Profile saying the same things.
• Product, if you sell things, carrying price and availability.
• Breadcrumbs, which show the path to the page instead of a raw address in the results.

Beyond those, the returns fall away quickly. Adding types because they exist is a common way to spend an afternoon on something nobody will ever see.

Where it goes wrong

Most structured data problems fall into three groups, and only one of them is dangerous.

The harmless kind is markup with a missing field. Google ignores what it cannot use and carries on. The annoying kind is markup that breaks when somebody edits the page, which happens far more with formats woven into the visible content than with JSON-LD sitting in its own block.

The dangerous kind is markup that does not match the page. Ratings you do not have, prices that are not shown, a review count invented to make the stars appear. This is treated as spam rather than as an error, and the penalty is losing rich results across the site rather than on the one page. It is the one mistake here worth actively checking for.

How it connects to answer engines

The overlap with AEO is real and frequently overstated.

Assistants and AI answers read the visible page. They are not waiting for markup, and a page with no structured data at all can be quoted perfectly well. What markup does is provide a second, unambiguous copy of the facts most likely to be repeated wrongly: your hours, your location, what you actually sell.

That is worth having precisely because those are the facts a customer acts on. An assistant guessing your closing time from a sentence has a chance of getting it wrong. Reading it from a labelled field does not.

Checking what you have

Two free tools cover it, and they answer different questions.

Google’s rich results test takes one page and tells you what it is eligible for right now. Use it when you have changed something and want to know whether it worked. Search Console’s enhancement reports take the whole site and tell you what Google found the last time it looked, including errors on pages nobody has opened in a year. Use that one quarterly.

If neither has been opened in a year, start with the second one. Sites accumulate markup the way they accumulate plugins, and technical SEO work usually turns up two or three types nobody remembers adding.