SEO · Updated June 2026
Schema markup is structured data (usually JSON-LD) added to pages so search engines and AI systems understand content explicitly — product, price, rating, FAQ, article. It powers rich results and increasingly feeds AI answers in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
For stores, the highest-value types are Product (price, availability, reviews), FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, and Organization. Schema is also AI-search infrastructure: explicitly structured facts are easier for LLMs to extract and cite.
Schema is not a direct ranking factor, but it earns rich results (stars, prices, FAQs) that raise click-through rates, and it makes content machine-readable for AI search engines — both of which grow traffic.
Structured data is information formatted in a standardized, machine-readable way — on the web, usually schema.org vocabulary expressed as JSON-LD. It lets search engines and LLMs parse facts (prices, ratings, authors) without guessing from prose.
AI Overviews are Google’s AI-generated answers shown above traditional results, synthesized from multiple sources with citations. They reduce clicks for simple queries but create new visibility: being cited in an Overview positions your brand as the authority.
A featured snippet is the highlighted answer box at the top of Google results, extracted from a ranking page. Winning it requires directly answering the query in a concise, self-contained paragraph, list, or table near a matching heading.