37.0% of Homepages With JSON-LD Connect Their Schema Nodes Through @id References

Summary

A dental practice's homepage might carry three separate blocks of markup: one says there is a dentist's office at an address, another says there is a website with a search box, and a third describes the homepage. A person reading them assumes they are all about the same practice. A machine has to be told.

In JSON-LD, the @id property gives a node a name that other nodes can point to. When the WebSite node says its publisher is the node with a given @id, and the Organization carries that @id, the three blocks become one connected description of one business.

We checked 291,137 top-1M homepages with JSON-LD. 37.0% use at least one @id reference that resolves to another node on the page.

What we measured

From the October 2026 HTTP Archive mobile crawl we took every top-1M homepage, parsed its rendered JSON-LD and walked every nested object and @graph array. A node with an @id and a type counts as a defined node. An object whose only property is @id counts as a reference.

A homepage is connected if at least one reference matches a defined node's @id on the same page. For the stricter test we looked for pages with Organization, WebSite and WebPage nodes where the WebSite's publisher (or author, creator, owner, about) is an @id reference and the WebPage's isPartOf is an @id reference.

Half use @id, about a third actually connect nodes

Giving nodes an @id is only half the job. The link happens when another node points to it.

Among the 84,926 homepages that describe all three core entities, 80.8% link them fully.

The top 1,000 sites connect their markup least often

Large sites may hand-build markup per template, and many describe entities in separate blocks without linking them.

The long tail leads. WordPress homepages, which resolve references at a high rate, make up 29.7% of the 100,001 to 1M tier (77,926 of 262,097) but only 10.1% of the top 1,000 (36 of 355).

Platform choice shapes the result

Figures below are adoption shares by platform as detected by HTTP Archive.

On every platform, site owners can add or adjust markup with apps, plugins or custom code, so these shares describe what sites currently publish, not a limit of any platform.

What this means

Run your homepage through a schema validator and look at how many separate entities it shows. If your Organization, WebSite and WebPage appear as unrelated items, give the Organization an @id (your homepage URL plus #organization is a common pattern) and reference it from the WebSite's publisher and from the WebPage's about or publisher. Do the same for your WebSite and the WebPage's isPartOf.

Connected markup leaves less for a machine to guess about which business owns which page. If you want a second pair of eyes on how AI engines read your site, book a free AI SEO audit and we will check your schema connections too.

Limits

Homepages only. Inner pages may be linked differently.

We only match references within the same page. A reference to an @id defined on another URL is counted as unresolved, which may be valid.

The stricter trio test checks specific properties (publisher, author, creator, owner, about, isPartOf); other valid ways to link nodes are not counted there.

Platform detection comes from HTTP Archive's technology fingerprints.

Frequently asked questions

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