HTML tells a renderer what a page looks like; it tells a machine almost nothing about what the page is about. Structured data fills that gap: the same organisation, person, article, product or review described in a typed vocabulary that crawlers parse without guessing. On the web it almost always means schema.org terms serialised as JSON-LD in the page head.
The trust rule matters more than the syntax: markup should only restate what the page itself says. Review markup that names ratings nowhere visible, or a canonical that contradicts the visible URL, is treated as a reliability signal in the wrong direction. Done honestly it earns rich results, knowledge-panel material and clean entity reconciliation across languages.
Related terms
Answer engine optimization (AEO)
Structuring content so that answer engines — chat assistants and AI overviews — can find it, quote it and attribute it correctly.
Static generation (SSG)
Rendering pages to HTML at build time, so a request is answered by handing over a file instead of running code.
Core Web Vitals
Google's three field metrics for loading, responsiveness and visual stability, measured on real visits rather than in a lab.
The bench this belongs to
Web performanceA rebuild that loads on a phone on mobile data, in the country your customers are actually in. Core Web Vitals are the measurement, revenue is the point.
