SEO Structured Data: What Actually Shows in Search Results

Structured data is one of those SEO topics where everyone agrees you should do it and almost nobody measures whether it helps. I've added JSON-LD to a half-dozen client sites this year and tracked what changed in the search results. The honest list of what helps is shorter than the schema.org catalog.

What Actually Changed Search Appearances

Three schema types produced visible results within weeks:

1. Article schema on blog posts. Enables the publish-date pill and author attribution in results.
2. BreadcrumbList schema on any site with a real hierarchy. Replaces the URL in the result snippet with a navigable breadcrumb.
3. Organization schema on the homepage. Enables the knowledge panel sidebar for branded queries.

That's it. Everything else I added either did nothing observable or mattered only in niche cases.

The JSON-LD I Actually Ship

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "Post title",
  "datePublished": "2025-09-24",
  "author": {"@type": "Person", "name": "Author"}
}
&lt;/script>

Five fields. Validated in Google's rich results tester. Deployed.

What I Stopped Bothering With

FAQPage schema is gated now, Recipe schema doesn't apply to most clients, HowTo was deprecated in search. I used to add all of these defensively. Now I add only what I can see change in a search result within a month.

See the schema.org docs for the full vocabulary.