98.8% of Top-1M Sites Running Applicant Tracking Software Show No JobPosting Markup on Their Own Pages

Summary

Picture a 40-person HVAC contractor that is hiring two service technicians. The openings sit in an applicant tracking widget on the careers page. When a technician asks an AI assistant "who's hiring HVAC techs near me," the assistant leans on job data it can read. JobPosting markup on the company's own page is how the employer supplies that data directly.

JobPosting markup describes an opening: title, employer, location, pay, posting date and closing date. Google uses it for job search features, and AI engines can use the same fields.

Very few employers' own sites carry it. Of 1,368 top-1M sites with detected recruiting software, only 16 showed JobPosting markup on a crawled page.

What we measured

We used four October crawls from HTTP Archive (2023 to 2026), mobile client, top-1M sites. We identified sites running any technology in HTTP Archive's Recruitment & staffing category and checked their homepage and one sampled inner page for JobPosting nodes in the rendered JSON-LD, after flattening nested objects and @graph arrays. We also looked at every crawled page whose URL contains careers, jobs, vacancies, hiring or similar words in several languages.

Field completeness uses every JobPosting node found on any 2026 page and is reported in aggregate. No recruiting software is named.

Employer sites with recruiting tools rarely mark up jobs

Job listings managed in recruiting tools are often shown on the vendor's domain or in an embedded frame. In those setups the employer's own page has nothing to mark up.

Both shares have stayed low and flat across all four crawls since 2023.

Pay and closing dates are the common gaps

Across every JobPosting node in the 2026 crawl, the required fields are well covered. The fields job seekers ask about most are not.

A job with no salary and no closing date gives an assistant little to compare when someone asks for well-paid openings that are still open.

Bigger sites show even less job markup

Career-style pages by site rank, 2026.

Some large employers run separate job portals, which may sit outside this sample.

What this means

If you hire through an applicant tracking tool, check where your job pages actually live. If they sit on the vendor's domain, ask whether it outputs JobPosting markup there, and consider publishing each opening on your own site too. Include title, description, datePosted, validThrough, hiringOrganization, jobLocation, employmentType and baseSalary, and use jobLocationType for remote roles. An AEO agency can check one live posting against that list in a few minutes.

Hiring visibility in AI answers depends on the same structured facts. A free AI visibility audit can show whether assistants know you are hiring and what they say about your openings, and our answer engine optimization services cover job pages as well as service pages.

Limits

HTTP Archive crawls one homepage and one inner page per site, so many job pages are not sampled.

Job pages hosted on a recruiting vendor's own domain are outside this sample, which counts only the employer's site.

Career-style pages are identified by URL words and include some job boards and listing pages.

Recruiting software detection depends on HTTP Archive's technology fingerprints.

Frequently asked questions

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