AI search and working with a developer
What is Speakable?
Speakable is a structured data property marking which parts of a page are suitable for text-to-speech. Google limits its rich result to news publishers in specific locales, so its durable value is telling any extraction system which passage is the answer.
Also called: SpeakableSpecification · voice search markup
How it is written
A SpeakableSpecification node with a cssSelector array naming the elements — typically the h1 and a class applied to the direct answer block. Three lines of JSON-LD.
Expect no Google feature
For an ordinary business site there is no visible rich result from this today, and there may never be. Ship it because the selectors are an explicit statement about which passage is quotable, not because a star will appear.
The honesty requirement
The selector must point at content the user can actually see. Marking up a hidden summary is the same policy violation as invisible FAQ markup, and it is easy to do accidentally when the answer lives in a data file.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Voice search optimization, minus the recycled advice covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.