What is structured data, for AI?
A business's facts held as distinct, checkable fields, availability, price, terms, rather than as prose an AI agent has to read and interpret to extract the same information.
2 min read
What matters is whether an agent has to guess, not how technical the underlying fields sound. A sentence describing a cancellation policy has to be parsed and might be read wrong; a field that states the policy directly doesn't. Structured data for AI specifically means fields shaped around what an agent checks, not a general markup vocabulary built years ago to help a search engine show a nicer result to a person.
Good for
Letting an agent check a fact directly instead of inferring it from prose.
Not good for
Helping a page rank better, that's a different job, the one search-engine markup already does.
What counts as a verified fact?
A fact an AI agent can trust because it traces back to a real source, a business's own booking system, a supplier feed, a confirmed document, rather than to unverified marketing copy or a crawled page.
What is an Echo?
Selfe's structured representation of a business, the specific, verified facts an AI agent checks, kept separate from the website copy written for a browsing person.
What is MCP?
Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets an AI agent call into a business's own systems, checking live data or triggering a defined action, the way it would check availability or pull a menu.