Lizzi Sassman and Martin Splitt brought on a special Google guest on their Google search off the record podcast to discuss structured data. The guest is named Ryan Levering who has been with Google for over 11 years working on structured data.

Structured Data Past At Google

In short, Ryan Levering explained that when he first started working on the structured data project, he worked on that legacy data highlighter tool in Search Console. But early on, Google seemed to try to move away from requiring us to highlight or markup our content and wanted to use machine learning to figure it all out, which Google’s Gary Illyes said back in 2017 but kind of retracted in 2018. So Google poured a lot of effort into machine learning to figure it out.

Structured Data Present At Google

But over time, Ryan said, it was “much easier to just ask people to give us their data rather than to pull it off of the web pages.” “It’s surprisingly more accurate,” he added. So they then moved more resources into building out structured data and support documents for site owners to use and hand over the data.

But machine learning is now thrown out the window. Ryan said they still use it a lot for (1) sites that do not use structured data where Google wants to still show rich results for those, (2) for mistakes or abuse, so Google can verify what really the page is saying compared to the structured data. So Ryan said it is a “multiple pronged approach” to using structured data and machine learning for understanding it all.

So that is how Google uses it all today but what about the future.

Structured Data Future At Google

The “medium term future,” Ryan said they plan on using structured data “not just visual treatments but actually help with more understanding on the page.” Google has mentioned this before, that structured data can help Google understand the page but it is not a ranking factor. I guess Google will be working more on that. Plus, medium term future” Ryan said Google wants figure out “how to use structured data more universally in a lot of our features rather than just like here and there, scattered around.”

Long term, Google said how Google can use structured data with how Google “interprets it in general into our internal graph.” Ryan said he “would like to move to where we are adjusting more and more data through structured data-specific channels rather than necessarily conveying all of our information on the web page itself.” Basically figuring out a “cleaner way to do data transfer between data providers and Google.” How does Google do this, he said maybe by working with the large CMS platforms so they can build it into their platforms directly.

Here is the podcast embed:

Here are parts of the transcript:

Forum discussion at Twitter.