Schema.org now shows you how many sites use each type of schema

The folks at Schema.org now provide aggregate usage statistics for Schema.org terms across the web. This will show you how many domains are using the schema/structured data element.

Schema.org announced, “we are pleased to share a new dataset that provides aggregate usage statistics for Schema.org terms across the web.” The dataset is updated monthly and aggregated at the domain level and presented in popularity grade buckets. “This approach helps filter through the everyday noise while highlighting meaningful trends for researchers and toolmakers to discover,” writes Schema.org.

How it looks. Here is a screenshot of the two Schema.org pages, the author schema and the event schema showing usage statistics upwards:

More about data. Schema.org shared more information about usage statistics here, here is a summary:

• Schema.org term frequencies are measured within Google’s public web crawling infrastructure. Data is aggregated at the domain level (like example.com), not individual pages. This means that if you use the same name on 100 pages of your site, it still counts as one domain that we use.
• Instead of showing exact, raw numbers (which change daily and can be noisy), websites are grouped into “bucket” ranges (like “10K – 100K” domains). This keeps the data stable and protects the privacy of the website.
• Hub The raw files are available on the GitHub site for the Google Public Stats dataset on GitHub. They are available in JSON and CSV with the same data and in JSON summary format with aggregated bucket distributions. They are updated every month.
• Term Type: Term type. This or Type (such as “Person” or “Event”) or Property (such as “number” or “phone”).
• The URI: The legal URI for this name (for example: http://schema.org/Person).
• Domain Count Bucket: Range of unique domains that use the name (for example: 100K - 1M domains).

Here’s a screenshot from GitHub:

Why do we care. Because we love data. Well, other than just love data, knowing whether a certain schema element is popular or not might be enough to convince your development team to use that schema code on your website.