What is structured data? (And why should you care?)

Structured data tells robots exactly what’s what on your website – no guesswork. Here’s what it is, why AI loves it, and how to get it without hiring a developer.

If you’ve ever come across the term “structured data” and thought “yes, yes, I keep hearing about this but I still don’t really understand what it actually is” – you’re in the right place. I’m going to explain it properly, from scratch, including why it matters right now more than it ever has, and what you can do about it without it costing you a fortune.

What does it actually look like?

Your visitors will never see structured data – it lives in the code of the page. But for robots, it looks something like this (using an event as an example):

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Event",
  "name": "Summer Networking Evening",
  "startDate": "2026-07-10T18:30",
  "location": "The Grand Hotel, Bristol"
}

Everything has its place and its label. The date of an event is always called “startDate”. A business’s name is always “name”. There’s no room for a robot to wonder whether “Thursday evening from half six” means 6pm or 6:30pm or whether it’s this Thursday or next. It’s just fact, laid out clearly.

Why do Google and AI tools love it so much?

They love it because it saves them from being wrong. And being wrong is something both Google and AI tools like ChatGPT really don’t want to be.

When AI answers a question, it’s pulling together information from across the web and trying to give the most accurate answer it can. If your website has structured data, you’re essentially handing it a clearly labelled, reliable source of truth about your business. That makes it much more likely to use your information – and to use it correctly.

For Google, structured data has been valuable for years. It’s how Google pulls through things like star ratings, event listings, and product information into its search results. For AI tools, the reliance on it is even stronger, because they’re not just deciding where to rank you – they’re deciding whether to quote you as a fact. The bar for confidence is higher, so the cleaner and clearer your information, the better.

Some examples of what structured data can cover

The types of information you can mark up with structured data include:

• Your business – name, address, phone number, founding year, social media profiles, opening hours
• Your services and products
• Your team members
• Reviews and testimonials
• Events
• Articles and blog posts
• FAQs (more on this below, because it’s a topic that confuses a lot of people at the moment)
• Recipes, job listings, courses – the list goes on

Essentially, if there’s a type of content that exists on the web, someone at schema.org has probably defined a standard way to label it.

So where does the structured data actually live?

The ideal answer is: on your website. A developer (or a plugin, if you’re on WordPress) can add the relevant structured data into your pages so that whenever a robot visits your site, it gets the full picture in a format it can trust completely.

This is the gold standard. Your website is your home on the web, and having structured data there means the information is tied directly to your domain, with all the authority that comes with it.

If your website is on WordPress, there are plugins like Yoast and Rank Math that handle some of it for you automatically – particularly the business basics and article markup. For more detailed structured data (services, testimonials, awards, team members), you’d typically need a developer to implement it properly, or a plugin that covers those specific types.

What if you can’t add it to your website?

Not everyone can. If you’re on a hosted platform that doesn’t give you access to the code, or you’re not on WordPress, or you just don’t have a developer and don’t want to take on the cost of getting one involved just for this – you’re not out of options.

That’s exactly why we built AIProfiles.co.uk.

You fill in your business information, and AIProfiles generates the structured data for you and hosts it on a profile page. You then add a link to that profile from your website (in your footer is fine) – which tells robots “here’s where to find the structured data version of all our important information”. It also gives you a llms.txt file, which is a newer format that’s become a suggested standard for how to convey key information to AI bots specifically.

It’s not quite as powerful as having the structured data baked directly into your own website, but it’s a really solid second-best – and it’s genuinely much better than having nothing at all, which is where most small businesses currently are.

With promo code 2026, an AIProfiles profile costs £24 a year, locked in for life at that price. You can get started here at aiprofiles.co.uk.

What about FAQ schema? I heard Google stopped supporting it

This is a good question, and one I’ve been getting a lot – especially now that Google announced in May 2026 that it’s removing FAQ schema from search results.

Here’s the thing though: for the vast majority of businesses, this change doesn’t actually affect anything. Google stopped displaying FAQ rich results (those expandable questions and answers in search) for most websites years ago – they were already only showing them for government and certain authoritative health sites. So if you had FAQ structured data on your site and you were quietly hoping for accordion-style FAQs to show up in Google – that stopped being a realistic expectation for most people a long time before May 2026.

What hasn’t changed at all is the underlying value of having FAQ structured data. When Google, ChatGPT, Claude, or any other AI tool crawls your website or your AIProfiles page, it uses that FAQ data to understand what questions your business answers, and to answer those questions with confidence when someone asks. The FAQs don’t need to appear visually in search results to be doing their job – they just need to exist, in a format robots can read and trust.

Why FAQs matter a lot, whatever format they’re in

I’d actually argue that FAQs are one of the most useful things you can have on your website right now, structured data aside. People are more likely than ever to ask AI tools questions like “what’s the best [your type of business] in [your area]” or “how much does [your service] cost” – and if you’ve got clear, well-written answers to those questions on your site or in your AIProfiles profile, you’re putting yourself in a much better position to be cited.

The trick is knowing what questions people are actually asking. A good free starting point is AlsoAsked, which shows you the questions people search for around any given topic. It’s a really useful way to spot the things your customers are wondering about that you haven’t thought to address anywhere.

And if you want a quick way to generate a set of FAQs relevant to your business, AIProfiles has a free FAQ generator – no account needed, just fill in a few details and it’ll give you a starting point you can refine and use.

So, what should you do next?

If you’re on WordPress and you want to explore adding structured data to your site, have a look at what your SEO plugin already covers and come and have a chat with us about whether it makes sense to go further.

If you’re not in a position to add it to your site right now – or you just want to get something in place quickly and cost-effectively – head to AIProfiles.co.uk and build your profile. Use promo code 2026 to lock in the £24/year price. It takes about 20 minutes, and once it’s done, it’s working for you in the background every time a robot comes looking for reliable information about your business.

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