Microdata
Microdata is a way to label facts inside a web page's own HTML so software can read them. It's part of the HTML standard. You add attributes to the tags holding your text: itemscope marks a thing, like your business, itemprop marks each fact about it, like its phone number, and itemtype says what kind of thing it is.
Source: WHATWG HTML Living Standard, Microdata, checked October 29, 2026
What Microdata means for your business
Google's guide to structured data describes microdata as a way to nest the labels inside your page's HTML content. So the labels live in the same tags as the words people read. Change the wording or the layout of the page, and you can break the labels without noticing.
If your site already has microdata that works, we wouldn't rip it out for its own sake. We'd test it with Google's Rich Results Test after every redesign or theme change, and fix what's broken. When we add new labels, we'd write them in JSON-LD, so they sit in one block apart from the page design.
If a redesign quietly dropped the labels your old theme added, checking what your site's code still says about you comes before adding anything new.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview led with the statistics meaning, survey records about single people or households, citing the Census Bureau, Eurostat and university guides before MDN for the web meaning. ChatGPT gave only the web meaning and cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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