JSON-LD Schema Markup: A Practical Guide to Structured Data

30 August 2026

You've seen it in search results without knowing its name: a recipe with a star rating right in the snippet, an FAQ that expands inline, a product with its price shown before you even click. That's schema markup (also called structured data) at work — and it's simpler to add than most guides make it sound.

What schema markup actually is

It's a standardized way of describing your page's content in a format search engines can parse directly, instead of guessing at it from your HTML. The current standard way to write it is JSON-LD — a block of JSON, wrapped in a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag, describing what's on the page using a shared vocabulary defined at schema.org.

Search engines don't have to show the enhanced result even if your schema is valid — it's a hint, not a guarantee — but pages without any structured data are never eligible for these rich results at all.

The types you'll actually use

Article — for blog posts and news content; includes headline, author, and publish date
FAQPage — marks up a list of questions and answers, which can render as an expandable FAQ dropdown directly in search results
Product — price, availability, and brand for ecommerce listings
LocalBusiness — address, phone, and hours for a physical business location
BreadcrumbList — shows your page's position in the site hierarchy (Home > Category > Page) directly in the search snippet

A minimal example

Here's what Article schema looks like in practice:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "Your Article Title",
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Your Name" },
  "datePublished": "2026-08-24",
  "description": "A short description of the article.",
  "url": "https://example.com/your-article"
}
</script>

That entire block gets pasted once into your page's <head> (or anywhere in the body — placement doesn't affect validity). No plugin, no build step, just a script tag.

Generate it without writing JSON by hand

The Schema Markup Generator covers Article, LocalBusiness, Product, FAQPage, and BreadcrumbList — fill in a short form and copy out the finished, valid JSON-LD block, ready to paste into your page.

Check your work

After adding it, paste your page's URL into Google's Rich Results Test to confirm it's actually valid and eligible for a rich result — a typo in the JSON silently breaks the whole block, so this step matters.