Structured data has a reputation as SEO homework — a thing you sprinkle on for rich snippets and forget. For AI engines it plays a different role: it's the machine-readable statement of what your page is, and engines lean on it when deciding whether a page is a product, an article, an organization or noise.
The five that matter
- Organization — who you are, your logo, your canonical URL. The anchor everything else hangs off.
- Product / SoftwareApplication — what you sell, with real pricing. Engines answering "how much does X cost" quote this.
- FAQPage — literally questions and answers, pre-chunked for a model to lift.
- Article — with real
datePublishedanddateModified. Freshness signals live here. - BreadcrumbList — cheap way to show engines how your site hangs together.
What to skip
Almost everything else, at least at first. Exotic types add maintenance surface without moving citations. And never mark up things that aren't true — fake reviews, fake FAQs. Engines cross-check markup against visible content, and the honesty rule applies to your data too.
The analyzer's structured-data category validates what you ship and flags what's missing for your page type — copy-pasteable JSON-LD included in the fix.