When to use ‘mentions’ vs ‘about’ in your schema markup

📌 When structuring schema markup, prioritise using the mainEntityOfPage property to highlight the primary topic of your content. This property is more effective than about and mentions for signalling the most important entity on a page to search engines.

What is the difference between schema.org properties ‘mentions’ and ‘about’?

The ‘mentions’ property allows you to reference multiple topics or concepts in your content. The ‘about’ property highlights the most important topics or concepts for search engines.

Use the about property for secondary topics that directly relate to the primary subject. For additional, less central topics, employ the mentions property. Together, these properties help search engines understand your content’s hierarchy and focus.

Using both schema.org properties can sometimes enhance how machine learning systems interpret webpage content such as the entity map created through schema markup shown above.

But which should you use?

Let’s take a look at the Nike AU product category page for men’s basketball shoes as a way to make sense of the difference between ‘about’ and ‘mentions’.

When you look at this page, what is the most important topic or concept of this PLP?

It’s probably the concept of basketball shoes and this is how you could describe it with JSON-LD:

{
    "about":{
         "@type":"Thing",
         "name":"Basketball Shoes",
         "sameAs":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basketball_shoes"
    }
}

Next, what are the secondary topics or concepts you’d want Google to know about this product category page? Well, it’s probably all the related products which would look like this:

{
    "mentions":[
        {
            "@type":"Product",
            "name":"Kobe 4 Protro 'Girl Dad'",
            "brand":{
                "@type":"Brand",
                "name":"Nike",
                "sameAs":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike,_Inc.",
                "alternateName":"Nike, Inc.",
                "@id":"https://www.nike.com/au/#brand"
            },
            "url":"https://www.nike.com/au/launch/t/kobe-4-protro-girl-dad"
        },
        {
            "@type":"Product",
            "name":"Giannis Immortality 4",
            "brand":{"@id":"https://www.nike.com/au/#brand"},
            "url":"https://www.nike.com/au/t/giannis-immortality-4-basketball-shoes-hz7Kks/FQ3680-500"
        },
        {
            "@type":"Product",
            "name":"Sabrina 2 By Sabrina",
            "brand":{"@id":"https://www.nike.com/au/#brand"},
            "url":"https://www.nike.com/au/u/custom-nike-sabrina-2-by-you-10001913/3101211593"
        }
    ]
}

What about informational content—what is the best way to use ‘about’ and ‘mentions’ properties?

When it comes to information content, I recommend using the ‘mainEntityOfPage’ property to highlight the primary topic of the page. Instead of using the ‘about’ schema.org property to reference one or more important topics, use ‘mainEntityOfPage’ to specify a single topic, thing, or entity that your article is about. Then, you may use ‘mentions’ to cite all other topics, things, or entities that are related to your main entity.

This entity map shows how a search engine can easily understand that a medical article primarily focuses on migraine treatment, written by an expert in the field. The schema markup also highlights several secondary but related topics covered in the article.

And this is the JSON-LD that created the entity associations for the article.

{
    "@type":"Article",
    "name":"What Are the Best Migraine Treatments and Remedies?",
    "url":"https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/migraine/treatment-guide",
    "mainEntityOfPage":{
        "@type":"Thing",
        "name":"Management of migraine",
        "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6844299"
    },
    "mentions":[
        {
            "@type":"Thing",
            "name":"Migraine",
            "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q133823"
        },
        {
            "@type":"Thing",
            "name":"Fatigue",
            "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q9690"
        },
        {
            "@type":"Thing",
            "name":"Headache",
            "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q86"
        },
        {
            "@type":"Thing",
            "name":"Pain",
            "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q81938"
        },
        {
            "@type":"Thing",
            "name":"Medication",
            "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12140"
        },
        {
            "@type":"Thing",
            "name":"Triptan",
            "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q423866"
        },
        {
            "@type":"Thing",
            "name":"Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug",
            "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q188724",
            "alternateName":"NSAID"
        },
        {
            "@type":"Thing",
            "name":"Tablet",
            "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q206077",
            "alternateName":"Pill"
        },
        {
            "@type":"Thing",
            "name":"Paracetamol",
            "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q57055",
            "alternateName":"Acetaminophen"
        }
    ],
    "author":{
        "@type":"Person",
        "name":"Sarah Gupta",
        "sameAs":["https://www.goodrx.com/about/bio/sarah-gupta","https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-gupta-ab9b716/"],
        "knowsAbout":[
            {
            "@type":"Thing",
            "name":"Management of migraine",
            "@id":"http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6844299"
            }
        ]
    }
}

For your reference, this was the original article—https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/migraine/treatment-guide.

Why you should use ‘mainEntityOfPage’ and ‘mentions’ instead

The ‘mainEntityOfPage’ property highlights the most important item on a page for search engines. Unlike ‘about’ and ‘mentions,’ which can cover multiple topics, ‘mainEntityOfPage’ can only point to one main entity, making it a stronger signal.