Most writing about structured data is out of date, and the reason is that Google has spent the last few years quietly switching rich result types off. Advice that was excellent in 2022 now recommends work that produces nothing visible at all.
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So this is organised around one question: which schema types still earn you something, and which ones are now just tidy markup nobody sees.
What schema does, precisely
Structured data is a vocabulary from schema.org that describes what a page is about in a form machines can parse without inference. It says this string is a price, this one is an author, this date is when the article was published.
It is not a ranking factor. Google has been consistent on this. Adding schema does not move you up the results page.
What it does is qualify you for rich results — the stars, prices, breadcrumbs, images and expandable sections that make a listing occupy more space and attract more attention. The gain is click-through rate, not position. It also feeds Google’s understanding of entities, which is how a business becomes a thing Google knows about rather than a string it matches.
Use JSON-LD. It is what Google recommends, it sits in a script tag rather than being woven through your HTML, and it can be changed without touching the template.
What Google turned off
This is the part missing from most guides, including the three articles this one replaces.
FAQPage — restricted since August 2023. Google now shows FAQ rich results only for authoritative government and health sites. For an ordinary business, marking up an FAQ section produces no rich result whatsoever. The markup is still valid and may still help machine understanding, but if you are adding FAQ schema expecting expandable questions under your listing, that has not happened for over two years.
HowTo — removed. Dropped from desktop in September 2023 and then retired entirely. No rich result, on any device.
Sitelinks searchbox — retired in late 2024. The WebSite markup that produced it no longer does anything for that feature.
None of these deprecations were announced loudly, which is why they are still recommended everywhere. If your plan for structured data was FAQ blocks on every page, that plan expired.
What still works
Product and merchant listings. Price, availability, and review ratings in results. Still the most commercially valuable schema by a distance, and still fully supported. If you sell things, this is the one that matters.
Review snippets. Star ratings, with a significant restriction that dates to 2019: self-serving reviews do not qualify. You cannot mark up your own reviews of your own business or products and expect stars. Reviews of other things — products you sell, books, films — still work.
BreadcrumbList. Replaces the raw URL in the result with a readable path. Universally supported, trivially generated by any SEO plugin, and one of the few that genuinely costs nothing.
Article. Modest now — it mainly influences the headline and image treatment rather than producing a distinct rich result — but it is how Google reliably identifies author, publication date and publisher, which matters for anything where expertise is part of the judgement.
Organization. No rich result attached, and worth doing anyway. This is how you tell Google that a brand name refers to a specific entity with a specific website, logo and set of social profiles. For a site that does not yet rank for its own name, this is the most direct thing you can do about it.
LocalBusiness. Genuinely useful for a business with a physical location, with one correction to the common claim: schema does not feed your Google Business Profile. They are separate systems. GBP is managed in GBP, and local pack rankings come from proximity, prominence and your profile — not from markup on your site. What LocalBusiness schema does is corroborate your name, address and phone number, which helps consistency across sources.
Event, Recipe, VideoObject, JobPosting, Course. All still supported, all still produce distinctive results, all only relevant if you actually publish that kind of thing.
Checking what you have
Rich Results Test — the tool that matters, because it tells you not just whether the markup is valid but whether it qualifies for a rich result. Valid markup that qualifies for nothing is a common and quietly disappointing outcome.
Schema Markup Validator at validator.schema.org — checks the markup against the vocabulary without Google’s eligibility layer. Useful for diagnosing why something failed.
Search Console — the Enhancements section reports each detected type across the whole site, with errors and warnings. This is where you find the problem affecting two hundred pages rather than the one you happened to test.
View source — search for application/ld+json. If nothing comes back, you have no structured data at all, whatever your plugin’s settings page claims.
Implementing it in WordPress
The plugins do most of this without configuration. Rank Math generates Organization or Person, WebSite, BreadcrumbList and a default type per post out of the box, and lets you set a schema type per post or per post type. Yoast builds a connected graph automatically. SEOPress covers the same ground.
Two configuration decisions are worth making deliberately:
Organization versus Person. Plugins often default to Person. If you trade as a business, set this to Organization with the business name, logo and URL. It changes what Google can associate with your brand.
The default article type. Article, BlogPosting or NewsArticle. BlogPosting is right for most blogs; NewsArticle carries expectations about editorial process you probably do not want to claim.
Hand-written JSON-LD is worth it only for types your plugin does not cover — a Service block with your offerings and price ranges, for instance:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Service",
"serviceType": "Technical SEO and performance audit",
"provider": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Expert Web Audit" },
"areaServed": "Worldwide",
"offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"priceCurrency": "USD",
"price": "299"
}
}
</script>If you do add markup by hand, check first that the plugin is not already emitting the same type. Two conflicting Organization blocks on one page is worse than one, because Google has to pick and may pick the wrong one.
The rule that keeps you out of trouble
Structured data must describe what is actually on the page, visible to a visitor. Marking up a price that appears nowhere, an FAQ nobody can read, or a rating you invented is a spam policy violation, and the penalty for structured data spam is a manual action that removes rich results across the whole site.
This trips up well-meaning people more often than bad actors. Marking up an aggregate rating on a page that shows no reviews, or Product schema on a category listing, is the sort of thing a plugin will happily let you do.
Schema and AI answers
One genuine reason the picture is not as bleak as the deprecation list suggests. As more searches are answered by generated summaries rather than a list of links, machine-readable descriptions of who you are, what you sell and what it costs become more useful, not less — even where no rich result is attached.
That argument favors Organization, Service and Product markup on the pages that describe your business, which is exactly the schema most sites skip while adding FAQ blocks that do nothing.
The short version
Skip FAQ and HowTo — they no longer produce rich results for ordinary sites. Get Organization, BreadcrumbList and Article right, which your plugin will do for you once you set the type correctly. Add Product markup if you sell things, LocalBusiness if you have an address, and Service markup on your offer pages. Test in the Rich Results Test, not just a validator, so you know whether it qualifies for anything. And never mark up something a visitor cannot see.
Working through this list on your own site and would rather not? That is what an Expert Web Audit is for.
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