Schema markup (also called structured data) is code added to a webpage, usually in JSON-LD format, that describes its content in a standardised way search engines can read directly — like labelling a recipe's ingredients or a business's opening hours.
Schema markup uses a shared vocabulary, defined at schema.org, so that search engines don't have to guess what a piece of content means from plain text alone. Instead of a search engine inferring that a page is about a specific product from surrounding words, Product schema explicitly states the product name, price, and availability in a machine-readable format. The most common way to add it today is JSON-LD — a block of structured JSON placed in a page's HTML that lists the relevant properties for that content type. Common types include Article, Product, FAQ, LocalBusiness, Organization, and Breadcrumb, each with their own expected fields.
Schema markup doesn't directly improve rankings, but it can unlock richer search result appearances — star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumb trails, business hours — which tend to improve click-through rate. It also makes it easier for AI-powered search features and voice assistants to correctly understand and surface your content.
Illumae's Schema Generator produces valid JSON-LD for Article, FAQ, Product, Breadcrumb, Organization, and LocalBusiness schema, including several LocalBusiness subtypes. You paste the generated code into your page's head yourself — it doesn't inject automatically.
No. Valid schema markup makes a page eligible for certain rich result features, but Google decides case by case whether to actually display them, based on its own quality and relevance checks.
Not directly. It’s better understood as helping search engines understand your content more precisely, and as unlocking visual features in results that can improve click-through rate, rather than boosting your position directly.
They’re generally used interchangeably. "Structured data" is the broader concept of machine-readable content markup, and "schema markup" specifically refers to using the schema.org vocabulary, which is the standard most search engines expect.
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