Search two competing products in Google and you’ll often see one result showing a price, a star rating and “In stock”, while the other shows a title and two lines of text.
The difference isn’t ranking. Both might sit in the same position. It’s structured data — code in the page that tells search engines what each piece of information means, rather than leaving them to guess.
The result is a listing that takes more space, answers more of the question before the click, and gets chosen more often. And increasingly, it’s what AI tools read when deciding what to say about you.
What Structured Data Actually Is
A page of HTML tells a browser how to display things. It doesn’t say which number is the price, which text is the review, or whether “$49” refers to the product or the shipping.
Structured data adds that meaning in a standard vocabulary called