What is schema markup?
Schema markup is code that uses the terms of schema.org to describe a page. Schema.org calls itself "a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data" (read 1 November 2026). Its founding companies were Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex (Schema.org).
It is widely used. Schema.org says that as of 2024 "over 45 million web domains" mark up their pages with "over 450 billion Schema.org objects". The vocabulary is at version 30.1 and "can be used with many different encodings, including RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD" (Schema.org).
Is schema markup the same as structured data?
Nearly. Structured data is the general idea. Schema markup is structured data that uses schema.org terms. Google's docs mostly say "structured data" and note that "Most Search structured data uses schema.org vocabulary" (Google Search Central). In practice people use the two terms as one.
Which schema types matter for B2B SaaS?
- Organization: your company's name, logo and legal name.
- SoftwareApplication: your product. Google's gallery lists it as "Software app".
- Article and BreadcrumbList: blog posts, guides and where they sit on the site.
- ItemList: the entries in a list article, such as a "best X software" list.
- FAQPage: questions and answers. Google no longer shows the FAQ rich result.
- sameAs: a property, not a type. Schema.org defines it as the "URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity" (Schema.org), such as your Wikidata entry or LinkedIn page.
Does schema markup help you get cited by AI?
Google says no special markup is needed: "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add" (Google Search Central).
Others say the opposite. Many SEO tools and agencies claim schema raises AI citations. In the official docs we read, we found no page from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity or Microsoft that confirms it. Our reading: schema helps machines read facts you already state on the page. It does not replace clear text, or being named on the third-party lists that AI answers quote.
How do you add schema markup?
- Choose the schema.org type that fits the page.
- Write it in JSON-LD, the format Google recommends.
- Only mark up what visitors can see on the page.
- Test it with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.
- Keep it in your page templates, so new pages get it by default.
Google's rules apply: "Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page", and a structured data issue "can result in a manual action" (Google Search Central).
What does schema markup look like? (hypothetical example)
A hypothetical example: a marketing blog publishes "7 best email tools for startups". The page carries Article markup with the author and the date it was last updated, plus an ItemList with the seven tools in their order on the page. The visible text and the markup say the same thing.
For how markup fits into getting named in AI answers, see our guide to LLM SEO.