CRO & Site Audit
Structured Data / Schema Markup Basics
A person can look at your page and instantly tell it's a product, a review, or a business listing. A machine has to be told. Schema markup is how you tell it.
What It Is
Labels a machine can read
Structured data — often called schema markup — is a set of invisible labels added to a page that spell out, in a format machines understand, what the page's content actually means. Not just "here is some text and a number," but "this is a product, this is its price, this is its rating, these are its opening hours." The visitor never sees it. Search engines and AI answer engines rely on it.
Without it, a machine has to guess what your page is about from the raw words. With it, you've removed the guesswork and told it directly.
Why It's Worth It
Better understanding, better presentation
Two payoffs come from getting the basics right. First, understanding: when a search engine or an AI answer is confident about what a page is, it's far more likely to surface it for the right query — and increasingly, to quote it in an AI-generated answer. Second, presentation: clear markup is what powers the richer search results — star ratings, prices, FAQ dropdowns — that make a listing stand out and earn more clicks.
It's one of the few genuinely technical items where a modest, correct effort yields a disproportionate, lasting return.
The Basics Worth Having
Cover what your page really is
You don't need exotic markup on everything. You need the right, correct labels on the pages that matter: your business details, your key products or services, your reviews, your FAQs. The two failure modes to avoid are having none at all — leaving machines to guess — and having broken or mismatched markup that claims something the page doesn't actually show, which can do more harm than good. Correct and simple beats ambitious and wrong.
What Audry Does Here
The reviews Google didn't know were there
A local business has dozens of genuine five-star reviews on its own site, but its search listings look plain — no stars, no standout. The reviews are right there on the page; they just aren't labeled in a way a search engine can recognize, so it treats them as ordinary text and shows nothing special.
Audry's site auditor flags the missing structured data and the fix adds the correct labels, so those reviews can power a richer, more eye-catching result. On the technical side, this is Audry's territory: getting the markup right. What that markup unlocks — showing up well in AI answers and search — is the strategy ARIA's AI Visibility guide is built to measure and improve.
Keep Reading
Related guides
Pair correct markup with the pages engines can actually reach in The Missing Sitemap Problem, and the usability foundation underneath both in Accessibility as an SEO/CRO Foundation. Or return to the full CRO & Site Audit guide.
Make sure machines can read your pages
Audry's site auditor is being built now, and the structured-data check is part of the free tier. Join the waitlist to be first to find out what search engines are missing about you.
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