Motivation for JSON-LD

A typical result from an internet search includes a page's title, text containing the search terms, and possibly an image.

Other components are implied in search results, even though visitors do not see them. For example, publication date is an implied component, because search engines often allow filtering for assets published within the past six months.

A page's HTML may contain all of the components that a search engine needs to provide meaningful search results; often, however, those components are difficult to parse out of the HTML code itself. Even worse, the components may be missing from the HTML, and the search engine needs to infer or guess them.

JSON-LD addresses this chaos by folding a page into a predictable structure. A JSON-LD object clearly identifies the asset's title, body, when it was original published, most recently published, and much more.

{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@graph": [{
    "@type": "Article",
    "articleBody": "In this webinar, we'll discuss these challenges along with how businesses can utilize a digital asset management (CAM) system to overcome them.",
    "datePublished": "2022-03-18T15:38:04.292Z",
    "dateModified": "2022-03-18T15:55:54.824Z",
    "headline": "Overcoming 4 common digital asset management challenges"
 }]
}

The previous snippet is an example of a JSON-LD object corresponding to the above search result. (The actual JSON-LD object is quite a bit longer.) When a search engine detects a JSON-LD object inside a web page, it crawls that object instead of the HTML.

For a full description of JSON-LD, see JSON-LD JSON for Linking Data.