Schema Markup in SEO: What Still Works in 2026

Last verified: 29 September 2026

Schema markup in SEO is structured data you add to a page so search engines can read what the page is about in a machine-readable form. It does not raise rankings by itself. What it does is make a page eligible for rich results — and in 2026 the list of features it can earn is meaningfully shorter than it was two years ago. Google removed FAQ rich results from Search in May and deleted the documentation in June.

This guide covers what Google still supports, what it withdrew and when, the guidelines that decide whether correct markup actually displays, what changed for ecommerce markup this year, how to measure the effect honestly, and where to spend your implementation time.

What schema markup actually is

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying its content. On a recipe page, it labels the ingredients, the cooking time, the temperature and the calorie count. On a product page, it labels the price, the availability and the review rating. Because each element is labelled rather than merely present as text, Google can use the information to build a richer search result, and users can find the page by attributes rather than by keywords alone.

Google uses structured data found on the web both to understand individual pages and to gather information about the world more broadly — about the people, books and companies included in the markup.

The three supported formats

Google Search supports structured data in three formats, and states that all three are equally fine as long as the markup is valid and properly implemented per the feature's documentation:

• JSON-LD (recommended). JavaScript notation embedded in a