<b>Microdata isn't deprecated — but Google's tooling is voting with its feet</b>

<b>Microdata isn't deprecated — but Google's tooling is voting with its feet</b>

Nobody at Schema.org has formally sunset microdata or RDFa, and the spec still treats all three syntaxes as equal. But here's what's actually happening: the Rich Results Test, the structured data report, and nearly every new Google example ships JSON-LD first. Microdata edge cases (nested <code>itemref</code>, split DOM nodes) increasingly parse inconsistently.

The undercurrent — JSON-LD decouples your data from your DOM, which is exactly what AI crawlers want when they read a page without rendering it fully.

What it means for you — if you're maintaining legacy microdata, you're not breaking rules, but you're betting against the toolchain. Migrate high-value templates to JSON-LD; leave the long tail until a redesign.

Watch this: the next parser quirk will hit microdata, not JSON-LD.