The Structured Data Testing Tool by Google is a popular web app used by SEOs and webmasters to debug and validate Schema.org structured data. In July 2020, Google announced that they would be deprecating the tool in favor of their Rich Results Test. The news was not well received because the Rich Results Test is severely limited in scope and utility.
Several months later, on December 15, 2020, Google announced that they would be keeping the tool but moving it to a new domain because of the feedback they received.
To better support open standards and development experience, we’re refocusing the Structured Data Testing Tool and migrating it to a new domain serving the schema.org community by April 2021.
Ryan Levering, Google Search Engineering
On the same day as Google’s announcement, Dan Brickley, Developer Advocate at Google, and the person that runs Schema.org shared an email message and GitHub repository describing plans to remove the Google branding from the tool and to move it to validator.schema.org.
The intent is to rework it into a vendor-neutral tool that can continue to serve as a markup syntax checker for JSON-LD, Microdata, RDFa as used by the communities around Schema.org. Although it could live on its own independent domain, it would make a great addition to the Schema.org site, and I would like to proceed in that direction in 2021, as part of Google’s long-term commitment to hosting the Schema.org site and keeping it relevant for schema.org users.
Dan Brickley, email message sent to Schema.org Mailing List, Tom Marsh at Microsoft, Stéphane Corlosquet at Acquia, Yuliya Tihohod at Yandex, R.V. Guha at Google, Nicolas Torzec at Oath
On May 10, 2021, it was unofficially revealed on Twitter that validator.schema.org was live. Brickley responded to one of the tweets that announced it, stating, Well spotted, though I was going to announce it after some documentation tweaks! Consider yourselves early adopters.
The new Schema Markup Validator if virtually identical to Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
While the tool is marked as beta, SEOs and webmasters can start using the tool now.
This content was originally published here.