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- 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
- 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
- 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 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 - 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 - > 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