Fewer than half of popular .uk home pages carry structured data
Data study
An October 2026 check of the most-visited .uk websites finds that most home pages give search engines and AI assistants no machine-readable summary of who they are. Where that code does appear, it mostly names the site and the business behind it.
Every home page has two audiences. People see the photos, the menu and the sale banner. Machines read a quieter layer underneath. Search engines, and the AI assistants now answering shopping questions inside search, look for a short block of code called JSON-LD structured data, which states plainly what the site is, who runs it and what it offers.
Among marketers, the common belief is that this layer is standard kit by now, at least on sites with real traffic. The home pages tell a different story. Of the 3,927 most-visited .uk websites whose home pages answered a check in October 2026, just 45.6% carried any JSON-LD structured data.
Those sites are the .uk websites in the Chrome UX Report's top 500,000. Each home page was fetched once in the month, so the result is a single snapshot of where popular .uk sites stand. It gives UK businesses a plain baseline ahead of peak trading.
Most home pages give machines nothing to read
The check reads each home page as the server first sends it, before any JavaScript runs. Some sites add their structured data with scripts after the page loads, and those tags are missed here. The share is best read as a floor for markup delivered in the page itself, not a ceiling.
Even allowing for that, the received wisdom does not match what these home pages show. A majority of the busiest .uk websites send no structured data at all in the page a crawler first receives. For a business, this is the simplest test a machine can run: is there a label on the door? On most of these sites, there isn't one.
Home pages mostly say who they are
Where structured data does appear, it is largely about identity. WebSite and Organization types are neck and neck as the most common of the types counted, each on roughly a third of home pages, with WebPage on about one in eight.
| Structured data type on the home page | Share of checked .uk home pages (%) |
|---|---|
| WebSite | 32.1 |
| Organization | 32.0 |
| WebPage | 13.3 |
That pattern makes sense. A home page is where a business tells machines its name, its logo and its web address. Product details, prices and offers normally sit on individual product pages, which this check did not visit. The home-page result therefore says nothing about how well shops mark up what they sell. It covers only whether the front door is labelled.
About a quarter miss other home-page basics
Missing structured data is part of a wider pattern of thin housekeeping. Roughly a quarter of the same home pages have no meta description, a similar share have no H1 heading, and slightly fewer carry a page title longer than 60 characters, which Google is likely to cut off in results.
| Home-page basic | Share of checked .uk home pages (%) |
|---|---|
| No H1 heading | 26.7 |
| No meta description | 26.1 |
| Title longer than 60 characters | 23.2 |
These are the lines a search listing draws on. The title is the blue link and the meta description is often the grey text beneath it. Like structured data, they tell a machine in the site's own words what the page is about. When they are missing, search engines fill the gap themselves.
Bigger sites leave fewer images unlabelled
Size does buy some tidiness. Among the 556 checked .uk sites in the global top 100,000, 27.9% had at least one home-page image with no alt attribute, against 35.5% of the 3,371 sites ranked 100,001 to 500,000.
| Measure (checked .uk home pages unless stated) | Value |
|---|---|
| Carry JSON-LD structured data | 45.6% |
| WebSite type | 32.1% |
| Organization type | 32.0% |
| WebPage type | 13.3% |
| No meta description | 26.1% |
| No H1 heading | 26.7% |
| Title longer than 60 characters | 23.2% |
| Image with no alt attribute, top 100,000 | 27.9% |
| Image with no alt attribute, ranked 100,001 to 500,000 | 35.5% |
| WooCommerce, share of .uk home pages (September 2026), most of the 8 platforms measured | 9.31% |
| Shopify, share of .uk home pages (September 2026), second of the 8 platforms measured | 8.13% |
Alt text is the written description that screen readers, and machines, read in place of a picture. The check counts only images with no alt attribute at all. An image deliberately marked as decorative with an empty alt is treated as correct. On this measure, the larger sites keep their labels in better order. Smaller sites can close the gap with the same routine checks.
WooCommerce and Shopify run the most .uk shops
A separate September 2026 crawl of 343,930 .uk home pages detected WooCommerce on 9.31%, the most of the 8 e-commerce platforms measured, with Shopify second of the 8 at 8.13%.
That crawl covers .uk addresses only, so UK businesses trading on .com are not counted. It also spots a platform by its fingerprint on the home page, which can miss a system used deeper in a site. The shop crawl was not matched to the home-page check, so these figures cannot show which platform's sites carry more structured data. Any shop owner on either system can still check their own home page in a few minutes.
What this means for UK businesses
- Check your own home page first. View the page source and search for "application/ld+json". If nothing comes back, machines are getting no summary from you.
- Start with identity. WebSite and Organization markup on the home page tells search engines and AI assistants your name, address on the web and logo. The popular sites that have markup mostly start here.
- Put it in the page, not only in scripts. Some crawlers read the page before JavaScript runs. Markup that only appears after scripts load may never be seen.
- Keep product markup on product pages. Product and Offer details belong next to the item and its price, alongside any shopping feed you already send to Google.
- Fix the neighbours while you're there. A clear title, a meta description, one H1 and alt text on meaningful images are all part of the same job of telling machines what the page is.
Google's own guide to what structured data is and how Search uses it. The blue outline marks the middle panel showing the page source code with the structured data block. Screenshot published by Google for Developers.
Shoppers will always see the banner and the photos. The open question for this season is whether the machines see anything at all.
How we built it
Home-page check (October 2026). The site list is every .uk website in the Chrome UX Report's top 500,000 by global popularity, taken from the HTTP Archive crawl: 5,026 sites. Each home page was fetched once in October 2026 with a standard browser user agent. Only the 3,927 pages that answered with HTML are counted, and every share uses that base. The check reads the HTML as served before any JavaScript runs, so structured data, titles or other tags added by scripts are missed. A site counts as carrying structured data if its home page contains at least one JSON-LD block; types are counted per site, and a site can carry several. This is a measured count of the pages fetched, and a point-in-time snapshot, not a trend.
Alt attributes. A missing alt attribute is counted. An empty alt="" (the correct way to mark a decorative image) is not. Size tiers use the Chrome UX Report's global rank buckets: the top 100,000 (556 .uk sites answered) against those ranked 100,001 to 500,000 (3,371 sites). The difference between the two tiers is statistically significant (p<0.001).
Shop platforms (September 2026). Platform shares come from the HTTP Archive crawl of 343,930 .uk home pages, detected by technology fingerprint on the home page. Only .uk domains are included, and a platform used deeper in a site can be missed. This crawl was not joined to the home-page check, so structured-data figures are not split by platform.
