Originally published: December 13, 2023 · Last updated: August 17, 2026
Google still supports structured data for profile pages and discussion forums in 2026. These types are useful when a website genuinely contains creator profiles and user-generated discussions. They are not generic schema types to add to ordinary authorless articles simply because a plugin offers them.
What ProfilePage is for
Google’s current documentation says ProfilePage markup is designed for pages where a single person or organization affiliated with the site is the main subject. Valid examples include a forum user profile, news-author page, blog About Me page or employee profile.
The required main entity is the person or organization the profile page represents. The page itself should genuinely focus on that entity.
What DiscussionForumPosting is for
DiscussionForumPosting is intended for forum-style sites where users share first-hand perspectives. Google explicitly says it should describe user-generated posts, not ordinary articles written by the site’s publisher or agents.
If the site primarily follows a question-and-answer structure, Google recommends Q&A markup instead.
Do not mark blog comments as a forum page
An article with a comments section is still primarily an article. The existence of comments does not turn publisher-authored content into a DiscussionForumPosting.
Choose structured data according to the primary content and purpose of the page, not according to every element that happens to appear on it.
Connect authors and profiles accurately
For community sites, profile pages can provide a stable identity for authors whose posts appear across the platform. Use real profile URLs and accurate properties rather than inventing follower counts, interaction statistics or credentials simply to populate recommended schema fields.
Markup must match visible content
Structured data should describe information that is present on the page. Google’s forum guidance says each marked-up discussion post should include the full text of the post when that text appears on the page, and comments should represent the actual responses.
Microdata or JSON-LD?
For discussion forums, Google’s current documentation recommends Microdata or RDFa where practical because large post and comment text blocks can otherwise be duplicated inside JSON-LD. JSON-LD remains supported.
For most sites, maintainability matters more than format preference. Use the approach your platform can generate accurately and consistently.
Validate before scaling
Use Google’s Rich Results Test, deploy markup on a small number of representative pages and inspect them with Search Console URL Inspection before rolling it out across an entire community.
Valid markup creates eligibility for supported Search features. It does not guarantee that Google will show a special result.
Bottom line
Use ProfilePage for genuine creator or organization profiles and DiscussionForumPosting for genuine user-generated forum discussions. Do not retrofit these schemas onto ordinary publisher content. Structured data works best when it describes the page you already have rather than a page you wish Google would see.
Sources: Google ProfilePage structured data, Google DiscussionForumPosting structured data.