Structured data: the facts that arrive even when the page does not
When we fetched TradeCatcher's home page without JavaScript on 13 November 2026, the body had no readable text at all. The structured data still arrived: seven JSON-LD entries describing the business, the app and its FAQs, in plain text in the page header. Of everything on that page, it was the only description of the business a non-rendering crawler could read.
Structured data is a block of labelled facts, usually written as JSON-LD inside a script tag, using the vocabulary at schema.org. It does not run as code. To a crawler it is text with labels, so a crawler can read it whether or not it executes JavaScript.
What to mark up on a business site
- Who you are. Organization, or LocalBusiness if customers visit you or you serve an area: name, website, logo, address or area served, phone and email.
- What you sell. Service or Product, with an Offer for each price and its currency.
- Questions you answer. FAQPage, but only for questions and answers that appear on the page.
- Where the page sits. BreadcrumbList, so the page's place in the site is explicit.
For example, every service page on this site carries ProfessionalService, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Service and FAQPage entries, and the Service entry lists each offer with its starting price in US dollars.
The rules that keep it honest
Google's guidelines say structured data must be a true representation of the page, and that you should not mark up content readers cannot see (Google Search Central). Markup that disagrees with the page is worse than none: it gives crawlers two versions of your facts.
Expect less from it in Google than you once could. Since August 2023 Google shows FAQ rich results only for well-known, authoritative government and health websites (Google Search Central). FAQ markup still states each question and answer as clean, labelled text, which is useful to any crawler reading your HTML.
What we do not know
AI companies have not published how much weight their assistants give structured data, so nobody can promise it gets you cited. What it does is cheap and certain: it states your facts once, without ambiguity, in a form every crawler can read. On a page built in the browser it may be the only text a crawler receives (see why AI crawlers see an empty page).
Check it
Paste a page address into Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator to see what a crawler finds. The free GEO audit also checks for business and content types and writes a starting block for you to fill in.
Sources
- Our measurement: TradeCatcher home page fetched without JavaScript, 13 Nov 2026
- General structured data guidelines, Google Search Central
- Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results, Google Search Central, 8 Aug 2023
- Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search, Google Search Central
- Schema.org vocabulary, Schema.org