What schema actually does — and doesn't
Search engines read your page as text and infer meaning. Schema removes the inference: instead of hoping Google works out that "₹4,999" is a price and "4.6" is a rating, you declare it in a machine-readable block.
Two consequences, routinely confused. Schema makes you eligible for a different-looking result — star ratings, price, breadcrumbs in place of a URL. It does not make you rank higher; Google's line has been consistent for years that structured data isn't a ranking signal.
Worth having anyway: a result carrying a price and a rating takes more attention than a plain blue link. But an agency selling schema as a ranking service is billing you for a presentation change.
The types that still earn something
Schema.org lists hundreds of types. Google supports a fraction of them for search features, and that list has been shrinking, not growing. Here's the shortlist worth your time on a normal Indian business site.
- Vertical types still worth it where they genuinely apply: Recipe, Event, JobPosting, VideoObject, Course.
- Review and AggregateRating must reflect real reviews collected on your own site. Marking up ratings you invented is a manual-action risk, not a clever hack.
| Type | Where it goes | What it gets you |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Sitewide, usually the homepage. | Logo, name, social profiles and contact details tied to one entity. The base for a knowledge panel. |
| Article / BlogPosting | Every editorial page. | Author, publish and update dates, publisher. Feeds Top Stories and Discover eligibility. |
| Product with Offer | Every product page. | Price, currency, availability and review stars in the result. The highest-value type for ecommerce, by a distance. |
| LocalBusiness | Location pages and contact pages. | Address, hours, phone and geo — reinforces the Google Business Profile entity for local queries. |
| BreadcrumbList | Any page more than one level deep. | Replaces the raw URL with a readable path. Cheap, safe, still works. |
What Google retired, and what people still ship anyway
This section exists because half the schema advice online is dated, and nobody updates a blog post that already ranks.
FAQ rich results were cut back in August 2023 to a small set of authoritative government and health sites. HowTo rich results were removed entirely around the same time. The sitelinks search box was retired in late 2024.
None of it is harmful. FAQPage schema still describes your page accurately and is still parsed — it just doesn't produce the visual result it used to. Keep it if it's already there. Don't build a project around it.
Schema as an identity signal for AI answers
The more interesting job schema does now has nothing to do with rich results. Answer engines need to resolve entities — which "Apex Logistics" is this, is it the same company as the one on LinkedIn, does it operate in Pune.
Organization schema with sameAs links to your verified profiles, and consistent name and URL values across your site, your Google Business Profile and your social accounts, makes that reconciliation trivial instead of probabilistic. A hedging machine cites someone else.
It's the same work that underpins entity SEO: say who you are, in the same words, in a format a parser can't misread.
Adding it and checking it
Most CMSs already emit some of this: a decent WordPress SEO plugin covers Organization, Article and Breadcrumb, and Shopify themes usually ship Product schema. Check what you have before adding a plugin that leaves you with two conflicting Organization blocks on one page. On a custom Next.js build, generate the JSON-LD server-side so it exists in the raw HTML.
Then validate. Google's Rich Results Test tells you whether a page qualifies for a search feature; validator.schema.org tells you whether the markup is valid at all. Search Console's Enhancements reports catch errors at scale — that's where you find 400 products that lost their price field in a theme update.
One rule overrides the rest: the markup must match what a human sees on the page. Marking up a price nobody can find, or reviews that don't exist, is exactly what manual actions are for.