What Is Structured Data Markup? Rich Results and What Changed in 2026

Structured data markup is code added to a webpage that describes its content in a standardized, machine-readable vocabulary — telling a search engine explicitly that a number is a price rather than leaving it to infer that from surrounding text. It's not a ranking factor by itself, but valid markup can make a page eligible for rich results, and 2026 brought the biggest change to that eligibility landscape in years with the retirement of FAQ rich results.

What Is Structured Data Markup?

Structured data markup is code added to a webpage's underlying HTML that explicitly describes its content using a shared, standardized vocabulary — most commonly schema.org — rather than leaving a search engine to infer meaning from visible text alone. Where a human reader sees "Solid oak chair — €249 — 4.6/5 (128 reviews)" and infers the relationships intuitively, structured data spells it out unambiguously: this is a Product, its name is this string, its offers.price is that number, its aggregateRating is this value.

Four terms get used close together and are worth separating: structured data is the organized information itself; schema.org is the vocabulary defining what properties and types mean; a specific format — JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa — is how that vocabulary gets written onto the page; and schema markup is the general term for the resulting code, regardless of which format produced it.

The Three Formats

Rich Results and Eligible Types

Rich results are enhanced search listings that show information beyond a standard title, URL, and description — star ratings, price, stock status, breadcrumbs, event dates, or video thumbnails, depending on the schema type and the page's actual content. These enhancements make a listing more visually prominent and, in aggregate analyses, correlate with meaningfully higher click-through rates than a standard result. Eligibility is type-specific and content-dependent: Product, Article, BreadcrumbList, Organization, LocalBusiness, Event, and VideoObject each require the corresponding content type to genuinely exist on the page — markup describing something not actually present violates Google's guidelines.

What Changed in 2026

The most significant shift: Google permanently retired FAQ rich results from Search on May 7, 2026, following an earlier 2023 restriction that limited them to authoritative government and health sites. FAQPage markup still validates without errors and remains harmless to keep, but it produces zero search-listing benefit going forward. HowTo rich results were similarly deprecated on desktop earlier and are no longer supported. Neither retirement changes the value of writing genuinely useful FAQ or how-to content for readers — it only removes the specific SERP-visibility incentive that used to come with marking that content up in schema.org's terms. Separately, no dedicated schema.org markup is required for a page to be eligible for citation in AI Overviews or AI Mode; those surfaces draw from ordinary page content rather than a specific structured data type built for them.

Structured Data Markup vs. Adjacent Concepts

JSON-LD is one specific format for delivering structured data markup, and currently the one Google recommends by default — but it's a format, not a synonym for the broader concept. Structured data markup itself is a subset of the wider on-page technical signals a page can carry; unlike meta tags such as title and description, structured data doesn't change what's visibly rendered to a human reader at all, it only adds a machine-readable layer alongside it.

Limits

Structured data markup is not a direct ranking factor and never has been — it earns eligibility for enhanced display, not a ranking boost, and Google decides independently whether to actually show any given rich result even on fully valid, eligible markup. Markup that doesn't accurately reflect visible page content is treated as a guideline violation, so it should never be used to describe content that isn't genuinely present. And as the 2026 FAQ retirement demonstrates, rich-result eligibility for a given schema type isn't a fixed, permanent benefit — it's a Google product decision that can change, so markup investments are best weighted toward types with a track record of continued support.

Conclusion

Structured data markup gives search engines an explicit, machine-readable description of page content, most commonly delivered as JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary — and its confirmed benefit is rich-result eligibility, not a direct ranking effect. 2026's retirement of FAQ and HowTo rich results is a reminder that this eligibility shifts over time, so validate which schema types still produce a visible benefit before prioritizing implementation effort around them.

For teams that want to audit structured data coverage and accuracy across many pages, evaluate Nstdata Crawl for that extraction step.

FAQ