CiteSiteFree tool
Schema checker
Reads the JSON-LD on any page: what it declares, what fails to parse, and which types this particular page gives a reason to add. Paste the page you want cited, not your homepage.
Check the page you actually want cited — an article, a pricing page — rather than the homepage. Structured data is a property of a page.
The finding worth running this for
Malformed JSON-LD. It is present in your source, absent from every consumer, and completely invisible in a browser — the page renders perfectly, because nothing on the page depends on the block being valid. One trailing comma and the whole declaration is skipped in silence.
The crawler behind CiteSite’s own analysis discards blocks that do not parse, which is the right behaviour for a crawler and exactly the wrong behaviour here. So this tool reads them again from the raw HTML, keeps the failures, and reports the parser’s own error — including the character position, which is the difference between it is broken and it is broken here.
What structured data does for an answer engine
Not ranking. It removes inference. An assistant composing an answer has to decide who published a page, whether this Acme is the same Acme it saw on another site, when the claim was made and whether it is still current. Prose leaves all of that to be worked out from context. Markup states it.
That is why Organization is the one type this tool treats as important on almost every page. It is the declaration that binds a name on your site to an entity — and where you list your profiles under sameAs, it is the thread that ties a mention somewhere else back to you.
What it does not check
- Whether your markup is true. Nothing here compares a declared price to the price on the page, and inventing markup that does not match the visible content is the abuse the search engines actually police.
- Eligibility for a specific rich result. Those requirements change and belong to the engine that owns them; use Google’s own Rich Results Test for that question.
- Anything a browser adds after load. This reads the HTML as it arrives, which is also how most crawlers read it — so a page whose schema is injected by JavaScript will look empty here, and that is a finding rather than a false negative.
And if the page cannot be fetched by an answer engine at all, none of this matters yet. Check which crawlers your robots.txt allows first.
Questions
- Why does it only read JSON-LD?
- Because that is the format the search and answer engines document, and the one every new feature is specified against. Microdata is still consumed by Google and is not wrong; it is the older path. If a page has microdata and no JSON-LD, this tool says so rather than reporting nothing.
- My markup looks fine in the source. Why does this say it is broken?
- A JSON-LD block that does not parse is invisible everywhere except view-source. Nothing renders it, no browser warns about it, and the page looks completely normal. A trailing comma, a smart quote pasted from a document, or an unescaped quote inside a description will do it — which is why broken blocks survive on pages for years.
- Does more schema mean more citations?
- No, and a tool that scored you on quantity would be encouraging the wrong thing. Structured data removes ambiguity about facts a machine would otherwise have to infer — who published this, when, what it is called, what it costs. It does not make a page worth quoting. A page with perfect markup and nothing to say stays unquoted.
- Why does it not tell me I am missing Product schema?
- It will, on a page that says it is a product. Every suggestion here is triggered by something observed on the page — a dateline, an og:type, headings phrased as questions — rather than by a checklist. A checker that tells a blog post to add Product markup teaches its readers to ignore it, and pushes some of them into declaring things that are not true.
- Is FAQPage markup still worth adding?
- For rich results in Google, its role has narrowed considerably. As a way of stating a question and its answer as one linked pair, it is still the cleanest shape an answer engine can lift — which is a different reason to add it, and one that does not depend on a results feature staying switched on.
Related
Schema markup for AI search: the types that actually get read — which types earn their place, which are decoration, and the order to add them in.
Markup makes a page legible. Whether it gets quoted is a separate question, and the only way to answer it is to ask the engines — which is what CiteSite does, on a schedule, and records the provenance of every answer.