**Structured data is a machine-readable description of your page that tells engines exactly what your content means — not just what words it contains.** This check confirms your page includes structured data, ideally in JSON-LD, the format Google recommends. Without it, engines have to infer meaning from your text alone; with it, you state explicitly that this is an article, this is the author, this is the publish date.
It checks whether the page includes structured data and what form it takes. Specifically:
- Presence — whether any structured data (schema markup) exists on the page at all.
- JSON-LD format — whether it uses JSON-LD, the format Google recommends, rather than only older Microdata or RDFa.
- Schema.org vocabulary — whether it uses recognised schema.org types that engines understand.
JSON-LD structured data present passes; only Microdata or RDFa (no JSON-LD) is a warning; no structured data at all is a fail.
GEObubbly scans the page for structured data and checks whether it's provided in JSON-LD. It's a core, scored Structured Data check that runs directly against the page's markup.
Search and AI engines are good at reading text, but structured data removes the guesswork: it states, in a standard machine-readable vocabulary (schema.org), exactly what your content is — an article with this headline, author and date; a product with this price and rating; an FAQ with these questions and answers. Google strongly recommends JSON-LD, a block of structured data in the page's HTML that's separate from the visible content and easy for engines to parse, over the older inline Microdata and RDFa formats. The most visible payoff is rich results: review stars, FAQ accordions, breadcrumbs and other enhanced listings that make your search result stand out and earn more clicks. For GEO, structured data is even more valuable — it's the machine-readable layer AI engines trust to understand entities and relationships, so marking up your organisation, authors and content helps engines parse and cite you accurately. It must be valid and appropriate to count.
Structured data is a standardised, machine-readable description of a page's content, written using the schema.org vocabulary so engines understand exactly what each part means — that this is an article, this is its author, this is a product and its price. JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is the recommended format for providing it: a self-contained block of structured data placed in the page's HTML, separate from the visible content. Because JSON-LD is easy to add and parse, Google recommends it over the older inline Microdata and RDFa approaches that mix markup into the HTML.
JSON-LD is recommended because it's the cleanest and most maintainable way to add structured data. It lives in a single script block rather than being woven through your HTML attributes like Microdata and RDFa, so it's easier to add, read, update and keep in sync without touching your visible markup. Google explicitly prefers it and all major engines support it. That separation also makes it less error-prone, since you're not risking breaking your layout to describe your content. For new implementations, JSON-LD is almost always the right choice.
Structured data helps engines understand your content precisely, and it unlocks rich results — enhanced search listings like review stars, FAQ drop-downs, breadcrumbs, event details and recipe cards. These richer listings take up more space and stand out, which typically improves click-through even at the same ranking position. Structured data isn't a direct ranking factor in itself, but the clearer understanding and the rich-result eligibility it provides both contribute to better search performance. It's one of the highest-leverage technical additions you can make to a page.
Yes, meaningfully. AI answer engines rely on understanding entities — organisations, people, products, articles — and the relationships between them, and structured data states those explicitly in a machine-readable form rather than leaving engines to infer them from prose. Marking up your organisation, authors, content type and key facts gives AI engines a trustworthy, unambiguous description to work from, which supports accurate understanding and citation. As AI search grows, this machine-readable layer is becoming one of the most important things you can provide for GEO.
Add a JSON-LD script type="application/ld+json" block to your page describing the content using schema.org types — for example an Article with its headline, author and date, or a Product with its price and reviews. Many CMS platforms and plugins generate this automatically, and Google's documentation lists the supported types and required properties. After adding it, validate the markup to make sure it's well-formed and uses the right type, since invalid or mismatched structured data won't earn rich results and can confuse engines.