What is DefinedTerm?
DefinedTerm is the schema.org type for marking up a glossary entry: a term, its definition, and the glossary it belongs to, in machine-readable form.
It exists for pages like this one: a term, a short definition, and a link back to the DefinedTermSet the term is part of. Applied to a glossary, it states explicitly which text is the definition rather than leaving a crawler to infer it from the surrounding page.
Adoption is thin, and no engine has said what weight, if any, it gives the type over plain, well-structured prose. The defensible reason to add it is the same as for any structured data: it makes the page's structure explicit rather than inferred. It is not evidence that doing so changes whether an answer engine quotes you.
Related
- Structured dataStructured data is machine-readable markup, usually schema.org JSON-LD, that states explicitly what a page and its subject are.
- schema.orgschema.org is the shared vocabulary of types and properties, jointly maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex, that structured data markup uses to describe things on a page.
- llms.txtllms.txt is a proposed convention for a markdown file at a site's root that tells an AI assistant what the site is and which pages matter.
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