A site gets structured data added across every template. The validator goes green. Six months later somebody asks what it did, and nobody can answer — because "the markup is valid" and "the markup does something" are separate claims, and only the first one was ever tested.
What does structured data actually buy you?
Eligibility for specific result types, and nothing more. It is not a ranking boost. Google's documentation is direct about this: markup helps its systems understand the page and makes it eligible for enhanced presentation, but does not lift the page's position on its own.
The distinction is practical. If you added schema markup expecting rankings to move, the markup did not fail — the expectation was wrong. If you added it for rich results, there is a specific thing to check.
Every schema type either maps to a search feature or it does not. Markup with no corresponding feature is inert: correctly formed, and buying nothing. Knowing which of yours is which is the entire audit.
Which of your markup is eligible for anything?
Check each type against Google's own list of supported result features. Types like Article, Breadcrumb, Product, Review, FAQ, Event and Recipe map to documented features. A great deal of what sites deploy does not — plenty of valid Organization or WebSite markup exists on pages where no feature could ever result from it.
The feature list also changes. FAQ rich results were substantially reduced, then removed, and sites that built pages around earning them were left with markup that validates perfectly and displays nothing. Anything you deployed more than a year ago is worth re-checking against the current documentation rather than the version you remember.
How do you check what is actually happening?
Three tools, and they answer three different questions. Using the wrong one is why teams conclude their markup works when it does not.
| Tool | Answers | Does not answer |
|---|---|---|
| Schema validator | Is the syntax valid | Whether Google supports it |
| Rich Results Test | Is this page eligible for a feature | Whether it is being shown |
| Search Console enhancement reports | What Google found across the site, and impressions on rich results | Why a specific page was skipped |
The Search Console reports are the ones that matter, because they are the only source describing your live pages at scale rather than one URL in a test harness. If a type you deployed does not appear as a report there at all, Google did not find it, and the question shifts from markup quality to whether it is being rendered at all.
Why does valid markup get ignored?
Usually because it contradicts the page. Google's guidance requires structured data to represent content visible to the user, and markup describing things the page does not show is the most common reason for silent non-display.
The recurring versions:
- Review markup for ratings that appear nowhere on the page.
- Price or availability in the markup that disagrees with the price on the page.
- Markup injected by JavaScript that the crawler did not execute, so the rendered page has none.
- Two plugins each emitting their own JSON-LD block, describing the same entity differently.
Marking up an aggregate rating the page does not display. It is a guidelines violation rather than a clever shortcut, and the penalty is that all your markup gets trusted less.
Does any of this matter for AI answers?
Less than the vendors selling schema services suggest, and not zero. Google has said there is no special markup for its AI features; the same content and the same signals apply. What structured data does reliably is remove ambiguity — stating unambiguously what an entity is, who wrote it, and when it was updated.
That is worth having. It is not a separate discipline, and it does not need a separate budget line.
What to do this week
Open the enhancement reports in Search Console and list which types appear. Compare that against what your templates emit. Anything emitted but absent from the reports is either unsupported or not being seen, and both are worth ten minutes to establish.
Then delete the markup that maps to no feature and describes nothing a reader can see. It is not helping, and every block you keep is one more thing that can drift out of sync with the page.
Marked up everything and seen nothing change?
We will audit which of your structured data is eligible for anything, which is inert, and which is quietly contradicting your page.
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