What is the Schema.org Brand type (brand schema)?

Open the JSON-LD of almost any product page and you will find a line like "brand": { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Photomark" }. They are two pieces with the same name: brand, in lowercase, is the property of the product that says what its brand is; Brand, capitalized, is the type from Schema.org that describes that brand. Both are written in English because they are names in the vocabulary. A store should care for a practical reason: the brand is one of the data points a search engine uses to know which exact product is on the page, and in a store that sells other people's products it has an answer that is not the store's own name.

How it works

Schema.org defines a brand as a name used by an organization or business person for labeling a product, product group, or similar. It is not a company: Brand hangs from Intangible, the branch for things that are neither physical nor organizations. Its own properties are few: the logo (logo), a slogan (slogan), a review (review) and an average rating (aggregateRating). The name, the website and the profiles that confirm its identity it inherits from Thing, the most general type, as name, url and sameAs.⁠^{[1]Schema.org. Brand}

The brand property says the brand(s) associated with a product or service, or the brand(s) maintained by an organization or business person. It can be used on a product, a service, an organization or a person, and it accepts two kinds of value: a Brand node or an organization.⁠^{[2]Schema.org. brand} That leaves two correct ways to mark up a product's brand:

• A Brand node with its name, which is the usual case when the brand belongs to another company.
• A reference to an organization, which makes sense when the brand is the company itself: the product points with its @id identifier at the organization node the page already describes, instead of repeating its name.

Google asks for it in a specific way. In its structured data for merchant listings, brand.name is a recommended property: include the product's brand in the name property of the Brand type, if you know it, and at most one brand name.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} Its example is the one on the first line of this page, with another brand.

The brand does not travel through markup alone. In Google Merchant Center, the brand attribute is required for every product that has a clearly associated brand or manufacturer, and also when the manufacturer is the store itself, as with handmade or made-to-order products. It is optional for things without a clear brand, such as movies, books, music or posters. It takes 1 to 70 characters, and the rule for choosing the name is simple: the one people shopping online recognize.⁠^{[4]Google Merchant Center Help. Brand [brand]}

In a store

A made-up example: a photography store that sells other brands' products, compatible accessories and a strap it makes itself. All the brands are invented.

And this is how the brand looks in the battery's node, with the manufacturer part number (MPN) beside it, because the MPN only identifies something together with its brand:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "VX-200 battery compatible with Photomark cameras",
  "brand": {
    "@type": "Brand",
    "name": "Voltex"
  },
  "mpn": "VX-200"
}

Photomark appears in the name, because it tells the shopper which camera it works with, but not in brand. The brand says who made the product, not what it is compatible with.

How to check it

1. Search for "brand" in a product page's source code and see what is inside: a Brand node with its name, or a reference to an organization.⁠^{[2]Schema.org. brand}
2. Count the brands. Google asks for at most one per product.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data}
3. Compare the brand in the markup with the one shown on the page and with the one in your feed's brand attribute. Merchant Center also asks that it be in a single language or script.⁠^{[4]Google Merchant Center Help. Brand [brand]}
4. Review compatible accessories and replacement parts: their brand is that of whoever makes them.⁠^{[4]Google Merchant Center Help. Brand [brand]}
5. Check whether the page qualifies for rich results by running the URL through the Rich Results Test, and see that the product is detected with its brand, with no warnings about it.

Related concept: Organization

Brand and Organization overlap because a company can have several brands and a brand can share its company's name. Organization is who; Brand is the name under which that company identifies what it sells. Schema.org models it this way: an organization can list the brands it maintains with brand,⁠^{[2]Schema.org. brand} and a product has, apart from its brand, a manufacturer property, the maker, which expects an organization.⁠^{[5]Schema.org. manufacturer} On most product pages the brand is enough. If yours is a store that makes things, both data points point to the same company; if you resell, neither of them is your store.

To go further, the Product entry shows where the brand fits among the other properties, the GTIN one explains the third identifier, and the structured data reading path orders the rest of the terms.