Every schema guide tells you what to write. Few tell you to read first. Auditing the structured data on any page, yours or a competitor's, takes seconds with an extractor: paste the URL, and every JSON-LD block, microdata item and RDFa item the page serves comes back, with a summary table naming each type. That reading habit changes how you write markup, because you stop guessing what ranking pages do and start looking at it.
Paste a URL and press Extract schemas. The tool fetches the HTML, reads every JSON-LD script plus microdata and RDFa attributes, and shows each block formatted and copyable. Arrays and @graph wrappers are split so each entity gets its own row in the summary table, with its format, type, name, missing required properties and recommended ones. JSON-LD that isn't valid JSON is reported too, and a second tab lists the page's Open Graph and Twitter tags.
That one capability serves two workflows. One is competitor research: working out why a rival's results look richer than yours. The other is deployment checking: confirming that the markup you shipped last Tuesday actually appears on the live page. Most people arrive for the first reason and stay for the second.
Run a fictional engineering blog post, https://thestackreport.dev/posts/edge-caching, through the extractor and two items come back. The first is an Article: {"@type":"Article","headline":"Edge Caching in 2026","datePublished":"2026-03-14","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Mira Chen","url":"https://thestackreport.dev/authors/mira-chen"}}. The second is a BreadcrumbList, three ListItems running Home, Posts, Edge Caching in 2026, positions 1 through 3.
Two blocks, one lesson: this site marks authorship down to a linked author page, and its trail names match its URL structure. If your competing post ships neither, you've found the gap, and both halves are an afternoon's work to close. That's the usual pattern with extraction: the finding is rarely exotic, just a short list of ordinary things a rival does and you don't.
A repeatable routine: pick one query you're losing, paste the top three ranking URLs and your own into Compare up to 10 URLs, and download the Comparison CSV to see every type in one spreadsheet. Then look past types to fields: whether their Article carries a dateModified, whether their author is a plain string or a Person with a URL, whether offers and reviews appear on product pages.
Fields all three fill are the baseline for that query; fields none fill are your chance to be first. Copy a block and keep it as a structural template, replacing every value with your own. The structure is the lesson; the values are theirs. Then build your version with the matching generator and extract your page again after publishing.
For your own pages, start with the gap between what your CMS claims and what the server sends. Extract the live URL after every markup change. Missing blocks usually trace to template conditionals that skip a page type, plugins that strip script tags, or markup that only renders for logged-in users.
The Missing (required) column is the quick screen: it lists properties Google marks as required for that type that the item lacks, such as thumbnailUrl for a VideoObject, plus format errors such as a date that is not ISO 8601. Recommended to add shows what would make the item stronger. Garbled blocks are the subtler catch. A trailing comma, an unescaped quote or an unrendered template tag makes the JSON invalid, and search engines skip such a block entirely, so fix the source template.
Read the results with these caveats in mind:
Bookend your markup work with it: extract before writing to see the starting state, and extract again after deploying to see the result. Download JSON keeps a copy of both for your records, and the pair is a complete audit trail in under a minute.
Second, re-check your key competitors every few months. Sites change their markup without announcing it, and a rival adding author markup across their blog is worth noticing the month it happens, not the year after. Compare mode takes up to 10 URLs at once, so keep the list short and save each Comparison CSV to compare runs.
Reading reveals gaps; the generators on this site fill them. The Schema Markup Generator builds ten common types for one page, pre-filled from its URL, and its Validate code tab checks any block you paste. The Automatic Schema Markup Generator works across a whole site, crawling pages and comparing the JSON-LD they already have with what each should carry, a natural next step when an extraction comes back empty.
When the gap is a specific type, press Edit next to the item to open its dedicated generator, copy the block, and paste it into that generator's Import existing JSON-LD box to fix it. A missing trail, for example, is a job for the Breadcrumb Schema Generator, which imports or derives a BreadcrumbList from the same URL you just finished reading.
Try it now
The tool is one click away. No sign up, no upload, no payment.
Open Schema Markup Extractor