Unknown or Unrecognised Schema @type

Types not in the Schema.org vocabulary are ignored by Google and other search engines — the block provides zero SEO value.

Why it matters

Types not in the Schema.org vocabulary are ignored by Google and other search engines — the block provides zero SEO value.

Schedule a fix in your next sprint. Warnings won't block your site but they consistently leave performance on the table. Estimated SEO impact: low — small marginal improvement, but cheap to fix.

How to fix

• Check schema.org/docs/full.html for the correct type name (case-sensitive)
• Use the closest standard type instead of a custom one
• Validate with Google's Rich Results Test

Common causes

If the rule is firing across many pages, the root cause is almost always one of these:

• Schema fields filled with placeholder values during template development that survived to production.
• Required nested fields silently dropped when the upstream API response shape changes.
• Multiple schema types declared on one page where a single canonical type is expected.
• Mismatched values between visible HTML and JSON-LD trigger Google's "manipulative" filter.

Anti-patterns to avoid

Even with the best intentions, these "fixes" make the issue worse — recognise them so you don't ship them:

• Marking up content that doesn't actually exist on the page.
• Different visible price vs schema price.
• Declaring a Product schema for a category listing page.

How atlookup detects this

Our crawler renders each page with a real headless browser, then extracts every JSON-LD / microdata block and validates required + recommended properties against Schema.org and Google's Rich Results guidelines. Pages where the rule fires for unknown or unrecognised schema @type are flagged on the report.

If you'd like to see this rule fire on your own site, run a free 60-second audit — every page is reported with the exact lines that triggered it.

Tools to verify the fix

Once you've applied the fix, double-check with these external validators:

• Rich Results Test — Google's ground-truth validator for schema eligibility.
• Schema.org validator — Catches malformed JSON-LD before Google does.

Frequently asked questions

Related issues