JSON-LD vs Microdata vs RDFa: The Best Structured Data Format for AI Search

For AI search and answer engines, **JSON-LD is the format to use**. It lives in a single script block, stays decoupled from your visible HTML, is the easiest to validate and maintain, and is the format that modern crawlers and AI parsers handle most consistently. Microdata and RDFa still work, but they tangle markup into your page elements and are harder to keep correct at scale.

## The three formats in brief

All three express the same Schema.org vocabulary; they differ only in how the data is attached to the page.

- **JSON-LD** — a self-contained JSON object inside a `