Google’s John Mueller recently confirmed on Bluesky: structured data has no direct impact on SEO rankings. So why keep bringing it up in SEO discussions? The answer is simple: while structured data won’t boost your site’s rankings, it does play a vital role in optimizing visibility and engagement.
Key points:
- No direct impact on SEO, but essential for visibility and engagement.
- Rich results increase visibility and clicks in the SERP.
- Helps LLMs quickly extract relevant information.
- Schema.org increases the chances of showing and indirectly influences SEO authority.
What is Schema.org, and why is it so important?
Schema.org is a standardized vocabulary created in 2011 by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Yandex to structure data on the web. It allows developers to mark up specific information on their pages (such as products, events, or reviews) using tags, making it easier for search engines to understand.
The primary goal of Schema.org is to improve the indexing and display of web content by providing structured, easily interpretable data, allowing search engines to better understand and organize information. This improves the visibility of content in search results, particularly in the form of rich results, while promoting interoperability between different search engines and applications.
The indirect impact of structured data: greater visibility and engagement
Rich results: capture attention with more visibility
Let’s say a user searches for a Made in France product on Google. If your e-commerce site has properly marked up its pages with structured data (price, availability, customer reviews), there’s a high probability that your product will appear in Google’s rich results. This can include elements like user ratings, a product snippet, or even a review snippet, which will be visible directly in the SERP, attracting the user’s attention and increasing the chances that they’ll click on your link.
Similarly, if you have an educational video and have tagged it correctly, Google might display it as a rich video snippet, with a preview, duration, and how-to details. This lets the user know exactly what they’re going to see before clicking, increasing engagement.
However, it’s important to note that even if you implement Schema.org structured data and schemas correctly, there’s no guarantee that your content will always appear as rich results. Several factors, such as competition, site authority, and SERP refresh, play a role in whether rich results will appear.
Here is a list of Google’s recommended schemas, which, if implemented well, can potentially lead to rich results:
- Article: Displaying an article with a larger title and image.
- Book-related actions: Direct purchase of a book in search results.
- Breadcrumbs: Displays the site hierarchy to facilitate navigation.
- Carousel: Gallery-style display for content like recipes, movies, or restaurants.
- Course Information: Course details, including reviews and prices.
- Course List: List of available courses with their information.
- Dataset: Viewing datasets.
- Discussion Forum: Discussions displayed in search results.
- Education Questions and Answers: Educational Flashcards.
- Overall Employer Rating: Displaying an employer’s rating in job results.
- Salary Estimate: Display salary estimates for different jobs.
- Event: Rich results for events like concerts.
- Fact-checking: Summary of factual assessments.
- Frequently Asked Questions: Enhanced results from an FAQ page.
- Image Metadata: Details about the image, such as its creator and usage.
- Job Offer: Rich results for job offers.
- Educational Video: Rich results for educational videos.
- Local Establishment: Detailed information about a local establishment.
- Math Solver: Results for solving math problems.
- Movie Carousel: Carousel results for movies.
- Organization: Information about an organization, including its logo and contact details.
- Practical problem: Results for exercises in mathematics and science.
- Product: Rich results for products.
- Product Snippet: Details of a product in a snippet.
- Merchant Profile: Information about a merchant.
- Variants: Display of product variants (size, color).
- Profile Page: Displaying profiles of individuals or organizations.
- Q&A: Questions and answers on a given topic.
- Recipe: Enriched results for culinary recipes.
- Review Excerpt: Displays an excerpt of a user review.
- Software Application: Rich results for software applications.
- Speakable Item: Results that Google Assistant can read aloud.
- Special Announcement: Important or promotional announcement.
- Subscription and paywalled content: Indication of content behind a paywall.
- Vacation Rentals: Rich results for vacation rentals.
- Vehicle sheet: Information on vehicles for sale.
- Video: Rich results for videos, with the ability to watch them directly.
You can preview some of these rich results using Google’s Rich Results Test. This allows you to see how your tags will appear before they are indexed in search results.
You can also use Schema.org’s validation tool, but there is no preview tool available there.
An indirect impact on SEO ranking
While using structured data doesn’t directly influence your SEO rankings, it does have a significant impact on user engagement, which can indirectly affect your rankings. With compelling, rich results, users are more likely to click on your link. This increased engagement, especially the time spent on your page after the click—sends positive signals to Google, as confirmed by the NavBoost algorithm.
NavBoost emphasizes the importance of SERP click-through rates and on-page engagement to adjust SEO rankings. For example, if an electronics site displays a rich review snippet and many users click on it and spend time reading reviews or exploring other products, this can improve the site’s authority in Google’s eyes. Click-through rate and content engagement then become important criteria for the ranking algorithm.
In short, although structured data does not directly influence ranking, it plays a key role in increasing CTR and engagement on your site, a crucial factor for the NavBoost algorithm.
Schema.org and LLMs: A Powerful Duo
Generative language models (LLMs) like SearchGPT are capable of extracting information from web pages, but this process is time-consuming when the data isn’t well-structured. Structured data offered by Schema.org makes this task easier by making information easier to read and faster. This allows AI to easily find what it’s looking for without having to analyze long blocks of unmarked text.
Google still recommends to use structured data in an AI search world – focusing on those things that are actually visible in SERPs 👀 @JohnMu #sclmadrid pic.twitter.com/IT3mJrAFFc
— Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) April 9, 2025
Let’s take the example of a movie website that structures data like director, genre, or release date of movies with Schema.org. An AI engine can quickly extract this information to provide an immediate answer in search results, such as a summary or practical details (director, release date).
Be careful: AIs don’t always have access to the most recent information. So, while AI can offer quick answers, the information may not always be up to date. This is where Google, with its ability to index and update data directly from the web in real time, maintains a major advantage over generative AIs, which sometimes rely on pre-existing models or historical data (for now…).
Don’t neglect structured data in 2025
Structured data isn’t a direct lever to improve your SEO ranking, but its impact on user engagement is real. It makes it easier for Google and LLMs to understand your content while increasing your visibility through rich results. If you want to take advantage of AI and respond more effectively to user expectations, implementing clear structured data remains essential.
