Schema.org is a reference website that publishes documentation and guidelines for using

structured data A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. For instance, a data model may specify that the data element representing a car be ...

mark-up on web-pages (in the form of microdata,

RDFa RDFa or Resource Description Framework in Attributes is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within web documents. The Resource Descript ...

JSON-LD JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is a method of encoding linked data using JSON. One goal for JSON-LD was to require as little effort as possible from developers to transform their existing JSON to JSON-LD. JSON-LD allows data ...

). Its main objective is to standardize

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

tags to be used by webmasters for creating rich results (displayed as visual data or infographic tables on search engine results) about a certain topic of interest. It is a part of the

semantic web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

project, which aims to make document mark-up codes more readable and meaningful to both humans and machines.

History

Schema.org is an initiative launched on June 2, 2011, by

Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

and

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

(operators of the world's largest

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

s at that time) to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. In November 2011,

Yandex Yandex LLC ( rus, Яндекс, r=Yandeks, p=ˈjandəks) is a Russian technology company that provides Internet-related products and services including a web browser, search engine, cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming ...

(whose search engine is the largest in

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

) joined the initiative. They propose using the schema.org vocabulary along with the Microdata,

, or

formats to mark up website content with

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

about itself. Such markup can be recognized by search engine spiders and other parsers, thus granting access to the meaning of the sites (see

Semantic Web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

). The initiative also describes an extension mechanism for adding additional properties. In 2012, the

GoodRelations GoodRelations is a Web Ontology Language-compliant ontology for Semantic Web online data, dealing with business-related goods and services. It handles the individual relationships between a buyer, a seller and the products and services offered. In ...

ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...

was integrated into Schema.org. Public discussion of the initiative largely takes place on the

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

public vocabularies

mailing list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. Mailing lists are often rented or sold. If rented, the renter agrees to use the mailing list only at contra ...

. Much of the vocabulary on Schema.org was inspired by earlier formats, such as

microformat Microformats (μF) are predefined HTML markup (like HTML classes) created to serve as descriptive and consistent metadata about elements, designating them as representing a certain type of data (such as contact information, geographic coor ...

s, FOAF, and OpenCyc. Microformats, with its most dominant representative hCard, continue (as of 2015) to be published widely on the web, where the deployment of Schema.org has strongly increased between 2012 and 2014. In 2015, Google began supporting the

format, and as of September, 2017 recommended using JSON-LD for structured data whenever possible. Despite the advantages of using Schema.org, adoption remained limited as of 2016. A survey in 2016 of 300 US-based marketing agencies and B2C advertisers across industries showing only 17% uptake. As of 2024 over 45 million web domains have used schema markup on their web pages.

Validator A validator is a computer program used to check the Validity (logic), validity or syntactical correctness of a fragment of code or document. The term is commonly used in the context of validating HTML,Tittel, Ed, and Mary C. Burmeister. HTML 4 f ...

s, such as the deprecated Google Structured Data Testing Tool, or more recent Google Rich Results Test Tool, Schema.org Markup Validator, Yandex Microformat validator, and Bing Markup Validator can be used to test the validity of the data marked up with the schemas and Microdata. More recently,

Google Search Console Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a web service by Google which allows webmasters to check indexing status, search queries, crawling errors and search engine optimization, optimize visibility of their websites. Until 20 ...

(formerly webmaster tools) has provided a report section for unparsable structured data. If any Schema code on a website is incorrect, it will show in this report. Some schema markups such as Organization and Person are commonly used to influence search results returned by Google's Knowledge Graph.

Schema Types

Schema vocabulary includes sets of

types Type may refer to: Science and technology Computing * Typing, producing text via a keyboard, typewriter, etc. * Data type, collection of values used for computations. * File type * TYPE (DOS command), a command to display contents of a file. * Ty ...

, which each have related metadata properties that can be illustrated using pre defined enumerations and Datatypes. Types are managed by schema.org and are regularly updated as of February 2025, there are over 800 schema types. There are a number of subjects and elements that a web pages that can be marked up with using a Schema, with examples including: * Article *

Breadcrumb Breadcrumbs are a culinary ingredient consisting of flour or crumbled bread of varying dryness, sometimes with seasonings added. They are used for a variety of purposes, including breading or crumbing foods before frying (such as breaded cutlet ...

* Course * Event * FAQ * LocalBusiness * Logo * Movie * Product * Recipe * Review * Video

Examples

Microdata

The following is an example of how to mark up information about a movie and its director using the Schema.org schemas and microdata. In order to mark up the data, the attribute itemtype along with the

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

of the schema is used. The attribute itemscope defines the scope of the itemtype. The kind of the current item can be defined by using the attribute itemprop.

Avatar

Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)

Science fiction Trailer

RDFa 1.1 Lite

Avatar

Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)

Science fiction Trailer

JSON-LD

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Schema.Org Metadata registry Google Yahoo! Microsoft Bing Internet properties established in 2011 HTML5 Semantic HTML Semantic Web Ontology (information science) Information science