Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is the W3C's name for a web of data, where facts are published in common formats so apps, companies and communities can share and reuse them. It's built on RDF, a W3C standard for writing facts as linked statements. In 2013 the W3C folded its Semantic Web work into a wider data program.
Source: W3C, Semantic Web Activity, checked October 29, 2026
What Semantic Web means for your business
We'd say the big version of the idea, where any app could follow facts from one database to the next, never became how most of the web works. Two of its pieces matter to a business site: JSON-LD, the format Google recommends for structured data, is a W3C standard for writing linked data, and Schema.org gives sites a shared set of words to use with it.
You don't need to learn RDF or the rest of the standards. You need your site to say who you are in plain words, with the same facts in its structured data, so a program reading the page gets the same answer a person does.
If search engines and AI tools tell different versions of your story depending on which site they read, lining up the facts each of those sites carries is the part we'd take on.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, both answers explained RDF, triples and linked data. Google's AI Overview cited Wikipedia, graph database companies, GeeksforGeeks and YouTube, and also called it Web 3.0, a label easy to confuse with crypto's Web3. ChatGPT 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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