Insight
Structured data that helps engines describe you correctly
Which schema.org markup matters for a local or professional business, what it can and can't do for AI answers, and the mistakes that quietly undo it.
· 3 min read · By AuthEngine.ai
Structured data is a small block of code on your pages that states plain facts in a format machines don’t have to guess at. Your name. What you do. Where you are. How to reach you. Who you are on other sites.
It won’t make an engine recommend you, since nothing on your own site can force that. It does remove doubt about who you are, and doubt is a big reason engines leave a business out.
What it actually does
When an engine reads your site, it has to work out which business the page is about, whether the address on this page matches the one on your listing, and whether the “Smith & Co” on a review site is the same Smith & Co. Structured data answers those questions directly, in the vocabulary from schema.org that the major search engines share.
That matters more for AI answers than it did for blue links. An engine that’s about to name you in a sentence wants to be sure it has the right business and the right facts.
The markup worth having
For most local and professional businesses, four types do most of the work.
Organization or LocalBusiness. Your name, logo, address, phone, hours and service area. Pick the most specific type that fits, such as Dentist, LegalService or HomeAndConstructionBusiness, rather than stopping at the generic one.
sameAs. A list of your official profiles elsewhere: Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, industry directories, Wikidata if you have an entry. This is how you tell an engine that all those pages are the same entity.
Person. For businesses where the individual matters, like a surgeon, an attorney or a founder, mark up the people with their credentials and where else they’re listed.
Service. What you offer, described in the terms customers use, tied back to your organization.
Here’s the shape of a minimal block:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"name": "Your Business",
"url": "https://example.com/",
"telephone": "+1-512-555-0100",
"address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "addressLocality": "Austin", "addressRegion": "TX" },
"sameAs": ["https://www.linkedin.com/company/your-business"]
}What it can’t do
It can’t fix facts that are wrong everywhere else. If your listings show three different phone numbers, perfect markup on your site adds a fourth opinion.
It also won’t guarantee a rich result in Google. Google decides which markup earns special display, and it has narrowed some of those features over the years. FAQ rich results, for example, are now shown mainly for government and health sites. Markup is still worth adding for clarity. Just don’t add it expecting a visual reward.
The mistakes that quietly undo it
- Marking up things that aren’t on the page. Every fact in the markup should be visible to a reader too.
- Copying a template and never editing it. We’ve seen live sites announcing a placeholder business name to every crawler that visits.
- Letting it drift. You change your hours or move offices and the markup still says the old thing. Now your own site disagrees with itself.
- Fake reviews in markup. Self-serving review markup breaks Google’s guidelines and can cost you rich results.
How to check yours
Paste a page into Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator. Then compare what it found against your Google Business Profile, line by line. Any mismatch is worth fixing first.
This is one of the surfaces we build and keep current for clients. If you’d like us to look at yours, tell us what you do.