Every figure in this article is tied inline to a named, dated source — HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac, Milestone Research via Search Engine Journal, and BuiltWith — so nothing here is estimated. If a stat couldn’t be traced to a real study, it was left out.
How Many Sites Actually Use Structured Data?
The most rigorous public dataset on structured-data adoption comes from HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac, whose 2024 structured data chapter was published November 11, 2024. It found that JSON-LD, the format Google recommends, was used on 41% of pages crawled — up from 34% in the 2022 edition, a 7-percentage-point gain in two years. Microdata, an older structured-data syntax, was found on 26% of pages, holding relatively steady. The same Web Almanac data shows adoption isn’t just about schema.org markup either — Open Graph tags were found on roughly 64% of pages and Twitter Card meta tags on about 45%, both far more common than any single schema.org vocabulary on its own.
Looking at which schema.org types actually get deployed, the Web Almanac’s 2024 breakdown of JSON-LD usage on mobile pages found WebSite as the single most common type at 12.73% of pages, followed by Organization at 7.16%, BreadcrumbList at 5.66%, and LocalBusiness at 3.97%. More specialized types trail well behind: ItemList appeared on 2.44% of pages, WebPage on 1.49%, BlogPosting on 1.40%, and Product on just 0.77%.
BuiltWith’s Live Tracking Confirms the Same Pattern
BuiltWith, which continuously crawls and tracks technology usage across the live web, reports similar concentration among a handful of common schema types. Per BuiltWith’s tracking pages, Organization Schema is currently detected on over 23.3 million live websites, with an additional roughly 28.6 million sites having used it at some point historically. Person Schema is detected on over 6.4 million live sites, and Product Schema, despite its clear e-commerce use case, is detected on a comparatively smaller 2.7 million live sites — a gap that lines up with the Web Almanac’s finding that Product markup remains one of the least-adopted major types relative to its potential audience.
Does Schema Markup Actually Improve Click-Through Rate?
The most widely cited study on this question is Milestone Research’s analysis of Google search results, reported by Search Engine Journal’s Matt G. Southern on September 28, 2020. Milestone analyzed over 4.5 million queries and found that results displaying a rich result (the enhanced snippets that structured data makes possible — star ratings, FAQs, breadcrumbs, and similar) earned a 58% click-through rate on average, compared with 41% for standard, non-rich listings — roughly a 17-percentage-point gap, against an overall average CTR of 49.5% across all results studied.
That same Milestone/SEJ study found the CTR benefit varies enormously by rich-result type. FAQ rich results performed best, converting at 87% CTR (rising to 91% for non-branded FAQ queries specifically). Video rich results converted at 62% CTR overall, rising to 65% when the query included a brand keyword and falling to 50% without one. Not every enhanced result outperformed a plain listing, though — the same study found AMP article results converting at just 15% CTR, far below the study’s overall average, a reminder that “rich” doesn’t automatically mean “higher-converting” for every format.
Reading the Adoption Numbers Together
The Web Almanac and BuiltWith datasets are built differently — the Web Almanac crawls a large, curated sample of URLs at a fixed point in time for each edition, while BuiltWith continuously scans the live web and reports running totals — but they point in the same direction. Both show a small cluster of general-purpose schema types (WebSite, Organization, Person) dominating adoption, while transactional types like Product lag well behind despite arguably having the clearest commercial upside from rich results. The Web Almanac’s year-over-year comparison (34% of pages on JSON-LD in 2022 versus 41% in 2024) also shows the market is still actively shifting toward JSON-LD and away from Microdata and RDFa, which Google has signaled as its preferred format for structured data for several years running. That migration isn’t complete: Microdata was still present on 26% of pages as of the 2024 Web Almanac data, meaning a meaningful share of the web is still running an older implementation pattern rather than the JSON-LD format Google’s own documentation recommends.
Structured Data and Rich Results at a Glance
| Metric | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Pages using JSON-LD structured data | 41% | Web Almanac / HTTP Archive (2024) |
| Pages using JSON-LD, 2022 comparison | 34% | Web Almanac / HTTP Archive (2022 edition) |
| Pages using Microdata | 26% | Web Almanac / HTTP Archive (2024) |
| Most common JSON-LD type (mobile pages) | WebSite, 12.73% | Web Almanac / HTTP Archive (2024) |
| Organization Schema, live websites | 23.3 million+ | BuiltWith |
| Rich-result average CTR | 58% | Milestone Research, via Search Engine Journal (2020) |
| Non-rich-result average CTR | 41% | Milestone Research, via Search Engine Journal (2020) |
| FAQ rich-result CTR | 87% | Milestone Research, via Search Engine Journal (2020) |
| Sample size of Milestone CTR study | 4.5 million queries | Milestone Research, via Search Engine Journal (2020) |
What This Means for Prioritizing Schema Work
The adoption data and the CTR data tell complementary stories. Web Almanac’s numbers show that most sites are still only using the most generic schema types — WebSite, Organization, BreadcrumbList — while specialized, revenue-relevant types like Product remain under 1% of pages. Milestone’s CTR data suggests that’s a missed opportunity in specific cases: FAQ markup produced the single strongest CTR lift of any rich-result type in that study, at 87% versus a 49.5% all-result average, yet FAQ isn’t even among the most commonly deployed schema types per the Web Almanac’s 2024 data. For most sites, that points to a fairly clear prioritization: generic Organization/WebSite markup is close to table stakes at this point given how common it already is, while FAQ, Review, and Product markup remain comparatively rare and, per the CTR data available, disproportionately rewarded when done well. That gap between low adoption and high measured CTR is exactly the kind of finding that makes a “quick audit” worthwhile before investing further engineering time in structured data: implementing the schema types most sites already have is unlikely to move the needle much, while filling in the types most sites are still missing is where the CTR study suggests the larger, still largely unclaimed upside sits.
A caveat: the CTR figures cited here come from a single large study run in 2020, and click behavior on rich results has likely shifted since then — particularly with AI Overviews changing how SERPs are laid out. Adoption figures from the Web Almanac and BuiltWith are also snapshots from specific crawl dates, use different crawling methodologies (a curated large-scale crawl versus continuous live-web detection), and won’t perfectly match each other or your own site’s numbers. Treat all of the figures above as directional benchmarks, not guarantees.
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Sources
- Web Almanac (HTTP Archive) — Structured Data chapter, 2024 edition
- Search Engine Journal — “Google SERP Study: Which Rich Results Get the Most Clicks?” reporting Milestone Research data (Sept 2020)
- BuiltWith — Organization Schema usage statistics
- BuiltWith — Product Schema usage statistics
- BuiltWith — Person Schema usage statistics
