Schema & Structured Data for Squarespace

The mental model: schema is the metadata layer of your page, written in a vocabulary every major search and AI engine understands. The HTML you write describes what a human sees. The JSON-LD you inject describes what a machine reads. The same page can be a well-written essay to a reader and a clearly-typed Article entity to Google's understanding layer at the same time — and the two layers do not interfere.

 <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "Your page title" } </script> 

The vocabulary lives at schema.org¹¹, a collaborative project originally launched by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. The current version (30.0, March 2026) defines several hundred types and several thousand properties; in practice, a typical Squarespace site uses a dozen of them. The library on this pillar covers those twelve.

The reason is structural. Google has been parsing pages for two decades and inferring entities from clean HTML reasonably well; structured data was a nice-to-have unless you were chasing a specific rich result. AI engines, by contrast, are newer and rely on retrieval-time parsing rather than years of accumulated entity graphs. When ChatGPT-User or Perplexity-User fetches a page to cite, it has seconds to decide who wrote it, what business it represents, and whether the claim is supported — and JSON-LD answers all three questions on a single read.

The map matters because it changes the install priority. Pre-2023, the high-value schema types were Article + FAQ + HowTo. Today the high-value types are LocalBusiness + Product + Event for SERP visibility, and Article + Person + Organization for AI-engine citation. FAQ and HowTo schema still belong on the right pages — the FAQ hub, a genuine how-to article — but they no longer deliver the SERP enhancement they used to.

The split matters because of cardinality. An Organization entity describes the brand — it should fire once per page, defined once. An Article entity describes one specific page — it has to be defined per page. Putting an Article schema block in the site-wide header injects it onto every page, including the homepage and contact page, which is wrong and trips the Rich Results Test validator. Putting an Organization schema block in Page Settings only injects it on that one page, which is wasteful and means most of the site has no Organization signal.

The hidden conflict is duplicate type emission. If Squarespace already emits a BlogPosting block on a blog post and you inject a second Article block at the page level, the page now has two JSON-LD blocks describing the same Article entity. Google's validator handles this by parsing both, which usually works but occasionally produces “duplicate entity” warnings. The cleaner pattern is to inspect what Squarespace emits, decide whether to extend it (add @graph with the missing entities) or replace it (where the platform allows template override), and ship one canonical block per page.

Three Squarespace-specific gotchas worth naming. First: the auto-emitted Product block on Commerce pages uses "@type": "Product" at the top level — if you wrap your additions in a second top-level Product block, the validator sees two Products on one page. Use @graph instead. Second: the auto-emitted BlogPosting block does not include the author's sameAs links — the Person entity it ships is a bare name with no entity wiring. Third: Squarespace does not auto-emit BreadcrumbList on any template I've audited, which means a 60-second install captures a meaningful AI-engine and SERP signal that the platform leaves on the table.

The validators answer different questions. Rich Results Test answers “will Google show this as an enhancement?” (a Google-product question). Schema.org validator answers “is the markup structurally valid?” (a vocabulary question). A page can pass the Schema.org validator and fail to trigger a Google rich result — that's the FAQ scenario today, and that's fine if your goal is AI engine extraction rather than SERP visibility. Conversely, a page that fails the Schema.org validator probably won't be reliably extracted by anyone, AI engine or Google.

Each leaf below covers one type. The structure is the same on every page: what the schema describes, when to use it, the current 2026 rich-results status from Google Search Central, the required and recommended fields, a full copy-paste JSON-LD example for a realistic Squarespace business (not an abstract one), where to paste it on Squarespace, validation steps, and the common gotchas that catch first-time installs.

Start with the leaf that matches the page you're working on right now. If you're not sure where to start, work top-down through the SubPageGrid above — the order is the install order.

The fixes are quick once you know what to look for. Author the JSON in a plain text editor (VS Code, TextEdit set to plain text), not in Squarespace's rich editor or Microsoft Word. View source on the live page after pasting and confirm the JSON renders as JSON, not as escaped HTML. Run the Rich Results Test on every page you've touched. The full diagnostic list lives on the JSON-LD Injection leaf.