Schema Markup in Website Builders: What Still Earns Anything

Most schema advice written for website builders is selling a product Google discontinued. The pitch — add FAQ markup, get an expanded result with your questions in it — described real behaviour until August 2023, and has been wrong ever since. It is still the single most common recommendation in builder SEO checklists, which tells you how slowly this field updates itself.

So before comparing which platform lets you paste JSON-LD where, it is worth establishing what any of it is still for.

What changed in 2023, precisely

Google announced in August 2023 that FAQ rich results would be shown only for well-known, authoritative government and health websites, and that HowTo rich results would no longer be shown at all, on desktop or mobile. The HowTo documentation page was subsequently removed. Neither type appears in Google's current gallery of structured data features.

That is not a downgrade or a reduced likelihood. For an ordinary commercial site, FAQ markup produces no result decoration, and HowTo markup produces none for anybody. If someone is quoting you for schema work on the basis of snippet expansion, they are quoting from a 2022 playbook.

What structured data is still good for

Three things, and they are real.

Result features that still exist. Google's current gallery lists a couple of dozen types that do produce visible features — among them Product, Review snippet, Recipe, Event, Job Posting, Video, Breadcrumb and Local Business. If your site is a shop, a restaurant, an events venue or a recruiter, there is a live feature with your name on it. If your site is a consultancy publishing articles, there mostly is not.

Machine readability. Organization, WebSite, Article and BreadcrumbList markup rarely decorates anything, but it is how a machine establishes what entity a page belongs to and how a site is shaped. That understanding is upstream of a lot of behaviour you cannot observe directly, and shipping it costs nothing once.

Everything that is not Google. Other search engines, social previews, and an increasing number of tools that read pages programmatically all consume this markup. Optimising exclusively for one consumer of a public format was always a narrow way to think about it — though the assistants are the exception worth knowing about, because the evidence suggests they read visible text rather than markup, and that is a note of its own.

What it is not good for is ranking. There is no public evidence that structured data is a ranking factor, and Google has not claimed it is. It affects how a result can be presented, not whether it appears.

The one rule that gets sites in trouble

Markup must describe what is visibly on the page. Marking up a review that is not displayed, a price that is not shown, or questions and answers that no visitor can read is a structured-data policy violation, and it is the one mistake in this area with an actual penalty attached — manual actions for spammy structured data are a real category.

This is worth stating because the builder ecosystem produces the temptation. A plug-in or a pasted snippet that adds markup independently of the page content is exactly the shape of this problem, and on a drag-and-drop platform it is easy to end up with markup describing a page layout you have since changed.

What each builder lets you do

Wix adds structured data automatically to page types where it can infer the shape — products, events, blog and forum posts — and lets you edit those presets or paste custom JSON-LD. The panel validates: it refuses markup that is not valid JSON-LD, warns about syntax rather than silently saving something broken, and links out to Google's Rich Results Test from inside the editor. It is the best-designed implementation of this feature among the mainstream builders.

Webflow handles JSON-LD through page settings custom code, and — the part that matters at scale — on CMS templates the markup can be bound to collection fields, so four hundred article pages each get correct, individual markup from one expression rather than four hundred pastes.

Duda ships schema presets for business information, FAQ, video, product and article content, plus free-form custom code anywhere on the site.

Squarespace has no native panel. Custom markup goes in through code injection, written by hand and maintained there.

Shopify emits product markup through the theme, and customising it means editing theme code.

Hostinger's builder and GoDaddy's builder do not document custom schema injection. As everywhere on this site, that is recorded as not documented rather than impossible — but plan on the basis of what is written down.

How much should you care?

Less than the checklists suggest, and the amount depends entirely on what kind of site you have.

If you sell products, take a table booking, run events, or post jobs, structured data maps to a live result feature and a platform that cannot emit it properly is costing you something specific. Weight it accordingly when choosing, and check the detail — emitting some product markup is not the same as emitting correct pricing and availability.

If you publish articles and services pages, ship Organization, WebSite and BreadcrumbList markup because they are cheap and useful to machines, ship Article markup because it is trivially generated, and then stop. The next hour is better spent on the page's opening paragraph.

A short checklist before you ship any of it

Confirm the type you are adding still has a live feature in Google's current gallery, rather than one it had three years ago.

Confirm every value in the markup is visible on the page as rendered.

Run the page through Google's Rich Results Test, which tells you what is eligible rather than merely what is valid — the two are different and only one of them matters.

And check whether your platform is already emitting markup of its own for that page type, because two competing blocks describing the same thing is worse than one.

Which platforms hand you this control, and what they hand you it for, is part of the seven-builder control audit. The pattern across the set is consistent: the platforms that give you schema control are the same three that give you everything else.