Why structured data matters more now
Structured data has always helped search engines understand a page. Answer engines raised the stakes: when a model is deciding whether it can confidently state what your company does, explicit machine-readable facts are far more usable than prose it has to infer from.
Three types cover most of what an early-stage company needs:
- Organization — who you are, your logo, and your verified profiles elsewhere. Belongs on the homepage.
- SoftwareApplication — for a product page, including category and pricing.
- FAQPage — question and answer pairs. The most directly useful for AI citation, because it hands a model a pre-formed answer to quote.
The sameAs property does quiet work
Listing your verified social profiles under sameAs links your entity across the web. It is how engines connect your site to your LinkedIn company page and your founders' profiles, which is part of how a brand becomes a recognised entity rather than a string of text.
Write FAQs as answers, not as marketing
The FAQ block is quoted more or less verbatim when it is used. Write each answer as the complete, self-contained response you would want a model to give someone who asked that question — no build-up, no cross-references, no "as mentioned above".
Questions
JSON-LD or microdata?
JSON-LD. Google recommends it, it lives in one block in the head rather than being scattered through your markup, and it is far easier to keep correct as the page changes.
Can FAQ schema get me a rich result?
Sometimes, and eligibility has narrowed over time. The stronger reason to add it now is that answer engines use it to extract quotable answers, regardless of whether Google renders a rich snippet.
Should every page have the same schema?
No. Organization belongs on the homepage, product schema on the product page, and FAQ schema on pages that genuinely contain those questions and answers. Marking up content that is not on the page is a policy violation.
How do I check it works?
Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator. Both catch syntax errors and missing required properties in seconds.