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- Hacker News
- Since 2024, the traffic to our content based marketing pages is down about 85%. What I don't get is how Google has not been terribly impacted as well by the rise of the zero click SERP. Their SERP ad revenue, which is click-based, must be down by a similarly egregious amount. That being said, I've been unable to find any published numbers to refute or confirm this thesis.by jgalt212
- we use JSON-LD on our SaaS and it made a noticeable difference for rich snippets. the FAQ Page schema in particular, google started showing our FAQ answers directly in search results within a week of adding it. one thing i learned the hard way: keep the FAQ answers in the JSON-LD identical to what is viseble on the page. google will ignore schema if the text doesn't match the page content.by tosief
- Super useful article, wish that had existed in my seo days.
I had misunderstood the type field, because to me I was often just linking to a webpage, even if it is for a saas, the marketing page is still a webpage.
by tommica - I found out some years ago that emails that have the fancy features like plane tickets embedded or tracking information are all done with JSON-LD in the emails.
AFAIK only gmail supports it, though.
EDIT: some more info about it: https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-development/s...
by unkl_ - Outlook and iCloud support a subset (like tickets and reservations) tooby bob778
- We have semantic HTML, but for some weird reason we need to yet again re-express the semantic meaning of our website in bespoke weird JSON in a script tag that the browser won't process.by lenkite
- I don’t think you have understood the article enough. You can use Schema.org/FOAF/WikiData/etc. ontologies in HTML without JSON-LD and the script tags.by Diti
- What I see as the ideal would be a world where servers and browsers could do content negotitation, and have browsers attempting first to request only the json-ld from the website and using its own internal renderer format.by rglullis
- Semantic HTML doesn't cover what JSON-LD and other microformats cover.
From the article alone: what are the semantic elements for a person? A breadcrumb list? A software application? A blog? A blog posting?
Semantic HTML is there to aid humans using screen readers to navigate through generic elements like "navigation" or "article".
by troupo - I have used JSON-LD in my own websites and found that it fills a separate need from semantic HTML. Your semantic HTML will specify things that the browser processes, like the title and headings. The JSON-LD data is metadata, like date created, date updated, tags, authorship. These things can be expressed in the HTML using micro data, but I stopped using micro data because JSON-LD was easier.
The JSON-LD I populate from the same data that I use to generate my site, and I use the JSON-LD metadata to generate things like index pages (list of blog posts from 2024, all posts related to topic X, etc). The main consumers of JSON-LD are search engines.
If you are interested in getting offended, then think about how we are also putting OpenGraph metadata in our web pages. Two different metadata formats for the same page.
by klodolph - Microdata is also a thing, and if I'm not mistaken supports the same vocabulary as JSON-LD (schema.org is a good resource).
That said, JSON-LD has the default for a while now, much like how we largely abandoned REST for RPC. I'm not actually sure if microdata is still supported by all the important parsers today, I've defaulted to using LD for any site I've built for clients, especially ecommerce sites where I want Google Search exposure.
Edit: its worth noting the comparison with semantic HTML. Semantic HTML helps define the structure of the markup but not real world context like "this is a product for sale" or "this is a train schedule."
by _heimdall - One of the most frustrating experiences building my app was that search engine discovery doesn't work by itself.
My expectation was that I would make an SSR-rendered website, with sane content and meta tags, and my app would appear at least on the 1-3 page of search, because clever search engines would parse it.
In reality, I need to do all the JSON-LD, landings proposed not for sales but for SEO, fighting with Google Search Console, getting proper backlinks, etc.
And only after that could I hope that my project would appear at least somewhere.
by brachkow - I work in website monitoring we specifically had a client ask if we could add support for testing on page JSON-LD. Like other commenters have said, it seems what people are most focused on is the structured data that Google uses for rich results (AggregateRating, Event, Organization for the knowledge panel). FAQ Page used to get a lot of attention as well but for the record let it be known that between May and August 2026 Google is removing in phases support for FAQPage rich results. Google still uses the schema but no longer for rich results.
- Do these attributes actually help with search engine visibility or do they just make it easier for search engines to keep users from leaving the search page? Honest question here.by gomoboo
- Googly started showing sublinks into my site when I added json ld. So that was cool.by Sammi
- If you have a business site, the JSON-LD can be used to feed data to maps platforms. Address, hours, phone, menus.by edoceo
- Some additional information, what you actually want to implement for every website is Structured Data, using the Schema.org vocabulary.
JSON-LD is one of the ways to do this. There's also RDFa and Microdata.
I used this article and can recommend it when I first learned about it: https://neilpatel.com/blog/get-started-using-schema/
You can try exploring what data to add with this tool: https://technicalseo.com/tools/schema-markup-generator/
The full list can be found on the schema.org site: https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html
by bryanhogan - I've worked on professional SEO teams for a large stock photography org and this needs to be higher. JSON-LD is just the most attainable technical "bolt-on" implementation of structured data from both a server and client-side rendered web architecture.by dieselgate
- Forgot to mention, Google also has an introduction to Structured Data that is helpful: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...by bryanhogan
- I would encourage people who have the pragmatic bent to read about JSON-LD from the Google documentation for web sites;
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
You’ll also notice that a lot of the information is relevant to only a small subset of sites. Rotten Tomatoes can publish the critic rating for movies using JSON-LD, but that’s not relevant for me (even if I write a review for a movie).
JSON-LD is nice because it’s easy and it is actually used by search engines. Yes, it can duplicate information in the web page itself, but I think the dream of perfectly annotating information so it only appears exactly once in your document is, well, a dream of spherical cows and massless ropes. It takes human effort to make a webpage and I am ok with a little duplication in the final product. My <h1> duplicates information in <title> anyway.
by klodolph - But duplicating data will increase water expenditure. /sby jack_pp
- 403. That’s an error.
Your client does not have permission to get URL /search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data from this server. That’s all we know.
by inigyou - Fedi review sites (neodb/reviewdb, bookwyrm) make use of JSON-LD in a big way. Their entire data federation is based on ActivityStreams and JSON-LD, and so is the review data they get authors to share on their federation along with legacy sites such as goodreads. They're also considerate of proper RDF mappings (context namespace, RDF-friendly encoding of collections, etc.).by tannhaeuser
- You can use the JSON-LD for your movie reviews even if you're not a big site. I use it on my site for reviews (books, games, movies) and it seems to show up in most search engines with the star rating etc.by edent
- For rich link previews, OpenGraph[0] is much more often supported than JSON-LD.
For seo purpose, the kind of JSON-LD a search engine will support is very specific and limited. You are far better consulting the targetted search engine's documentation (Google[1], Bing[2]) and following that. Anything else is a waste of time.
Outside of search engines, again, without a specific purpose, JSON-LD is mostly useless. If you have a specific need that requires JSON-LD, go ahead and include the data you know will be useful. Including anything else is like shouting into the void.
IndieWeb[3] does use structured data but considers JSON-LD a DRY violation and uses Microformats[4] instead.
1: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
2: https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/marking-up-your-site-wi...
by ghssds - This is exactly my gripe with such structured web standards! There are just way too many for me to bother with, and none of them has good support.by zwu-var
- > It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking.
This is fighting the last war, to stretch a metaphor.
As far as I and my WWW site are concerned, Google has nowadays switched to giving people lengthy LLM-generated versions of my stuff, with errors, above pointing people to my actual stuff. 'Breadcrumbs' and getting a pretty display name instead of the domain name, don't address the fact that Google de-prioritizes all of that, pretty tweaks or no, nowadays.
This is a lot of effort for stuff that people visiting my actual site directly will never see, and which people using Google will not find above the fold of its own massively LLM-ized version of stuff.
by JdeBP - Yeah, I don't even permit Google to crawl and index my site any more.by phyzome
- I have now started including Google in the "bots get a 10GB zipbomb when they hit the site".
They add nothing of value, now, and only cause more problems.
- Yep. For years we loaded up web sites with "microdata" tags and attributes in the hope that they would drive traffic.
All it did was train Google's AI so people would never leave Google.
by reaperducer