Structured data (schema.org)
Structured data is machine-readable markup — usually JSON-LD using schema.org vocabulary — embedded in web pages to state facts explicitly: this is a Product, it costs this much, it has these reviews, this Organization sells it. Search engines and AI systems read it as ground truth about a page.
In context
Prose is ambiguous; structured data isn’t. "@type": "Product", "size": "US 2-14", "material": "silk" requires no inference, which is why both classic search (rich results) and AI answer engines lean on it. For ecommerce, the schema.org types that matter most are Product, Offer, AggregateRating, Review, Organization, and FAQPage.
The common failure mode isn’t missing markup — it’s thin markup: a Product node with a name and price but none of the attributes shoppers ask about. Pairing schema markup with semantic product data is what makes it useful to a reasoning model.
Related
Veristyle adds this data layer without changing the storefront. Check what your pages expose today with the free AI visibility audit.