Structured data is a standardized way to provide information about a web page. It helps search engines to understand your content and better represent it in the search results. Site Audit validates structured data based on the schema.org vocabulary and Google guidelines for rich search results.
Schema.org has set a standard of how structured data can be defined via properties, their possible types and values, and how properties can be nested into each other.
Google uses structured data to show the website content in rich search results in SERPs, like product carousels, FAQ sections, local business features, recipes, etc. There are several dozen such Search features. For each of them, Google has requirements for certain structured data hierarchy, properties and types to be present on the page. Site Audit cover checks for the required mandatory rules listed in Google’s guidelines.
Where to find Structured Data Issues
Once the crawl of your site is complete, you can find information about a page's structured data in the following ways:
Issues
If Site Audit has discovered any issues with your structured data, you will find them on the Overview or in the All issues report. Schema.org and Google validation errors are reported as different issues.
URL details
If you want to look at the structured data of a particular page, simply find and click on it in Page explorer. It will open the URL details panel. Navigate to the Structured data tab to look at the report.
Filters
In Page explorer, you can also search for pages with specific structured data properties and values. There's four filters available:
Schema items
Schema properties
Schema property values
Structured data issues
How to investigate structured data Issues
We suggest the following workflow:
Open the issue report. It will reveal pages with structured data validation errors and warnings. Click on the “View issues” link that will navigate you directly to the URL details panel / Structured data tab.
The Structured data tab shows the structured data properties with errors, as well as a detailed description of each issue with useful links:
Schema validation issues link to Schema.org documentation.
Google validation issues refer to Google guidelines.
You can check the reported issues in the actual source code of a page. Just open the View source tab and search for the parameter name or value.
Common validation issues that Site Audit checks for
Schema.org issues
JSON parsing error. Flagged if our crawler wasn’t able to parse the structured data on your page at all.
Missing @type property. Flagged if a schema object is missing the @type property.
Invalid schema type. Flagged if a schema type is invalid.
Invalid schema property. Flagged if a property name is invalid.
Unexpected type for a property. Flagged if a specified type is not expected for the given property, but is valid otherwise. We also list what the expected types are.
Unexpected property. Flagged if a property is not expected for the given schema object, but the property name is valid otherwise.
Invalid value for a property. Flagged if a property expects some specific defined values, but we found something else instead. E.g. “dayOfWeek” property expects only weekday names.
Duplicate property name. Flagged if an object has two or more duplicates of the same property.
Type is deprecated. Flagged if a type has been deprecated by schema.org.
Property is deprecated. Flagged if a property has been deprecated by schema.org.
Google issues
Missing required property for a Google Search feature. Flagged if your data is missing a mandatory property. Google needs this property to be able to display your content in the specified Search feature.
Missing one of required properties for a Google Search feature. The same issue as the above, but you will only need to include one of the listed properties to be on par with Google guidelines.
Property is missing a required type for Google Search feature. The flagged property should have a certain type to make your content eligible for the specified Google Search feature.
How Site Audit compares to other third-party validators
There’s some free validators that you can compare our validation results with:
https://validator.schema.org/ — native schema.org validator, validates only for schema.org issues.
https://classyschema.org/Visualisation — popular third-party validator, validates only for schema.org issues.
https://search.google.com/test/rich-results/result — native Google’s validator, validates only for Google rich results requirements.
They may all report slightly different results that may not match ours or each others'. Moreover, they sometimes do not coincide with official documentation. For example, Google’s rich-results validator is known to occasionally not report issues that they mention in their own guidelines. Site Audit will try to report as consistently as possible against Google's guidelines (and support it with links to those guidelines). But if you'll have any questions or concerns about our validation results, please contact our support team at [email protected] or the live chat at https://help.ahrefs.com.