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Agent LighthouseAgent Lighthouse

    Searches the text of every published page. The evidence sources themselves are not in this index — search all of them on the trusted sources page.

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    structured-data/howto-schema

    HowTo schema

    What it checks

    AI agents use HowTo schema to present step-by-step instructions as structured answers. Without it, agents must parse your numbered headings heuristically, which often breaks step ordering or misses steps entirely.

    Why it matters

    A page with sequential instructions that emits HowTo JSON-LD hands a reader an unambiguous ordered step[] array. The reader no longer has to infer step boundaries and ordering from headings and prose. That is an ingestion-quality benefit which would survive the loss of any rich result.

    Evidence

    HowTo JSON-LD as an ingestion-quality hint

    • The type is alive and broadly deployed: schema.org/HowTo carries no deprecated, attic or pending marker and reports 100K–1M domains (Google web index, July 2026) — schema.org/HowTo (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Pillar-level empirical support, not type-level. The GEO-16 study audited 1,702 citations across Brave Summary, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. It found that “pillars related to Metadata and Freshness, Semantic HTML, and Structured Data showed the strongest associations with citation” — arxiv.org/…/2509.10762 (verified 2026-08-21)

    Limits

    Explicit and strong. Google deprecated the rich result: “As of September 13, Google Search no longer shows How-to rich results on desktop, which means this result type is now deprecated” (developers.google.com/…/howto-faq-changes, verified 2026-08-21). It then removed the documentation — “Removed the How-to structured data documentation, as this rich result is no longer shown in search results” — and the old documentation URL now 301-redirects to an anchor Google named #how-to-deprecation (developers.google.com/…/updates, verified 2026-08-21).

    Google also states that unused markup is inert: “Structured data that’s not being used does not cause problems for Search, but also has no visible effects in Google Search.” The assistant path is gone as well: developers.google.com/assistant/content/howto returns HTTP 404, and the surviving “Actions from web content” overview lists only FAQs, Media, News and Podcasts. Beyond Google: Microsoft’s NLWeb codebase contains zero mentions of HowTo, Apple’s Applebot documentation names only isAccessibleForFree, and OpenAI’s commerce specification excludes JSON-LD sources entirely. The GEO-16 finding supports emitting structured data in general; it does not isolate this type.

    How it scores

    The type is genuinely widely deployed, and still first-class in the schema.org vocabulary. Structured data as a class is associated with citation. But no vendor documents any consumer reading HowTo today, and Google explicitly deprecated the only consumer that ever existed.

    Sources