Demystifying Structured Data with a Semantic Web Veteran
Website: invisiblegraph.com · Last updated: October 2026
Find Jarno van Driel on: LinkedIn · X (Twitter) · Bluesky · Mastodon · GitHub
Jarno van Driel is an independent Structured Data and Semantic SEO Consultant based in Rotterdam. His career started in 1998, during the early years of the web, and took him through roles as a print and web designer, Flash and 3D artist, front-end developer, and accessibility engineer before he specialized in structured data. His activities overlap with so many departments and specialists that, as he puts it, most people simply know him as 'just Jarno', "that structured data fanboy from Rotterdam, the Netherlands". Since 2018 he has worked independently, helping organizations worldwide develop structured data, corporate vocabularies, knowledge structures, and internal information models. Since December 2024 he has also been a guest teacher at SEO Pro Academy, where he teaches structured data in Dutch.
Van Driel's path into search runs through the semantic web. He became fascinated with it in 2008, when he discovered semantic metadata, and his background in web accessibility made semantic annotations a natural next step. As an early adopter of Linked Open Data, his work was mentioned in several W3C discussion groups, which led him to start publicly participating in schema.org in 2013. He discovered schema.org before its official release and, by his own estimate, was "probably amongst the first 25 websites out there" to use it. Through that community he met and learned from many of the pioneers behind today's semantic technologies. He shares his knowledge through The Invisible Graph, a resource focused on structured data, schema.org, and semantic SEO.
His contributions to the field center on education and on separating structured data facts from myths. At brightonSEO in April 2025 he presented "Does structured data markup influence EEAT?", a question he had also explored in an article on The Invisible Graph. At the 2025 edition of Friends of Search he delivered "Structured Data – A deep dive into its history, myths and future", and in 2024 he was a guest on Sitebulb's webinar "In The Age of AI, is Structured Data Dead?". He has written for Search Engine Journal about product variants in Google Search and Shopping, and he has appeared on podcasts and shows including Elless Media's Content Strategy Insights, Schema App's Schema Story, Kalicube Tuesdays with Jason Barnard, and The Search Session with Gianluca Fiorelli, where he discussed structured data in the age of LLMs and agents.
Van Driel's approach is defined by going back to primary sources. In The Search Session he argued that the real problem with structured data lies with people in the industry: "People don't read the actual source." He points practitioners to schema.org's own documentation, its GitHub repository, and the W3C specifications, rather than to the louder voices selling structured data as an advanced shortcut. He is equally clear about the popular claim that markup is needed to serve LLMs. LLMs, he explains, are machines that work with natural language, whereas "Structured data markup is created for RDF-based machines", ideally ending up in an RDF-based knowledge graph. This distinction gives SEO teams a far more realistic picture of what structured data can and cannot do.
A distinctive thread in his work is the connection between accessibility and search. After following accessibility patterns for a few months, he concluded that "Accessibility is seriously helping out search results", because content written according to accessibility guidelines is easier for search engines to parse and extract information from. This combination of accessibility engineering, front-end development, and more than a decade of hands-on schema.org involvement makes van Driel a rare kind of specialist: one who approaches structured data not as an SEO trick, but as part of a broader discipline of expressing structure and meaning on the web.
Jarno van Driel is an independent Structured Data and Semantic SEO Consultant based in Rotterdam. Since 2018 he has helped organizations worldwide develop structured data, corporate vocabularies, knowledge structures, and internal information models. Since December 2024 he has also been a guest teacher at SEO Pro Academy, teaching structured data in Dutch.
He started his career in 1998 as a print and web designer, Flash and 3D artist, front-end developer, and accessibility engineer. His accessibility background drew him to semantic metadata in 2008, and he concluded that "Accessibility is seriously helping out search results" because it makes websites easier for search engines to parse.
As an early adopter of Linked Open Data, his work was mentioned in several W3C discussion groups, which led him to start publicly participating in schema.org in 2013. He discovered schema.org before its official release and estimates he was among the first 25 websites to use it.
He presented "Does structured data markup influence EEAT?" at brightonSEO in April 2025 and "Structured Data – A deep dive into its history, myths and future" at Friends of Search 2025, and was a guest on Sitebulb's 2024 webinar "In The Age of AI, is Structured Data Dead?".
He explains that LLMs work with natural language, while "Structured data markup is created for RDF-based machines". He urges SEOs to read the primary sources, such as schema.org's documentation, its GitHub, and the W3C specifications, noting that "People don't read the actual source."