Insurance brokers and independent agents
Six delivery vans, a first commercial lease, a house built in 1920. Buyers ask an assistant who can insure the thing they have.
A contractor who needs liability cover before a job starts, or a family whose older house two insurers have turned down, asks an assistant for a broker nearby. The answer is a few names. What it can tell the buyer about yours rests on what your pages state: the lines you write, where you are licensed, and what you do when a claim comes in.
An assistant can put a broker forward for a buyer's risk only if something it can read connects the broker to that risk and that place. For a brokerage, the part of that it controls is its own pages: the lines by plain name, the markets, the licenses, how the firm is paid, the claims help, the area served and one identity.
How your customers ask
Questions from buyers with something specific to insure
Lines, markets, licenses and pay: the facts a brokerage states about itself
A buyer's question to an AI assistant can carry a line of insurance, a situation, a place, and a request for a person rather than a form. Each part is answered by a fact the brokerage states about itself, and the table lists those facts with the page each one belongs on.
| Fact | How to state it | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|
| Lines written | By the names buyers use: home, condo, renters, auto, umbrella; general liability, commercial property, professional liability, commercial auto and fleets, cyber, [other lines] | A page for each line you want buyers for |
| Situations | Named on each line's page: a first home, a new business, a contractor asked for a certificate, an older house, a young driver, a claim that needs help | The line pages |
| Markets | The insurers you place each line with, named where your agreements allow; otherwise how many, and for which lines | The line pages, and a markets page if you may publish one |
| Who is licensed for what | Each person's license class as the licensing body names it, the jurisdictions, the number, and a link to the body's public lookup | An about page with a section per person; the firm's own license on the contact page |
| How the firm is paid | Commission from the insurer, a fee, or both, in the words your license and agreements use | A page of its own, linked from every page that invites a quote |
| Claims help | What the brokerage does when a claim comes in, who takes the call and when, and the insurer's own claims line beside yours | A claims page, linked from every footer |
| Area served | The states, provinces or countries where you are licensed, and whether buyers outside the office's town are served remotely | The contact page and each line page |
| The firm | One name, one address, one main number, with the claims and service lines labeled | Every footer, every listing, the markup |
Every row describes the brokerage, not a policy. What a policy covers is set by its wording and its insurer; the pages say what the broker does, for whom, where and on what terms. The markets row and the pay row turn on your agreements and your license, so both are written in the words those use and cleared by whoever clears your advertising.
Licenses and lookups, and what to leave to the regulator
A buyer, or a machine reading for one, can check a license only if the page says which license it is. Write each license class the way the licensing body writes it, with the number, the jurisdiction and the holder, whether the firm or a person, and link the body's public lookup where it has one. Where someone is licensed in several places, list each; a line like "licensed nationwide" leaves a reader with no list to check against.
What the rules require beyond that is not for this page to say. Which disclosures a broker's site must carry, in what words and where, whether testimonials may appear, and whether an insurer may be named are set where you are licensed, and they differ from place to place. Visible within the rules sets out what a brokerage can state as fact, and what to take to the regulator or counsel first.
InsuranceAgency markup, and the crawl's figures for every trade
On schema.org the nearest type for a brokerage is InsuranceAgency, which schema.org describes in three words: an insurance agency. It is a subtype of FinancialService, itself a subtype of LocalBusiness, and there is no separate type for a broker. The fields Google's local business documentation lists apply to it, and FinancialService adds feesAndCommissionsSpecification, which can point at the page that says how the firm is paid.
Each line can be a Service node in the firm's JSON-LD, with its plain name as serviceType and the jurisdictions in areaServed. Licensed staff can be Person nodes listed as employees, each license a Certification with issuedBy naming the licensing body and certificationIdentification carrying the number its lookup takes. Leave ratings out of it: Google's review snippet rules make a business that controls the reviews about itself ineligible for review stars.
Our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros in the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, late August to early September 2026) has no cut for insurance brokers, so each figure that follows describes the whole sample.
17.8% of the sites had no schema.org markup at all, a further 13.7% had business markup missing the fields that would make it usable, and 61.5% had no question-and-answer content of any kind.
Then identity: at 43.1% of sites the three main pages did not agree about who and where the business is, and 36.9% gave more than one phone number. A brokerage with sales, service and claims lines has several numbers by necessity; labeling each one, and naming one as the main number, is what spares a reader the guessing.
Where a brokerage starts, and the article for each step
- Take a first reading: a fixed panel of buyer questions by line and situation, put to four assistants. What being named means for a broker sets it up.
- Run the crawler access check, and make sure no quote form or security layer sits between the public pages and an AI crawler.
- Settle the identity: one firm name, one address form and one main number, with the claims and service lines labeled, repeated without variation on every page and listing you control, so that each mention adds up to the same entity.
- Give each line you want buyers for a page with its situations, its markets where you may name them, and the area you serve.
- Publish the licenses with lookup links, how the firm is paid and the complaints route, cleared the way your advertising is cleared; visible within the rules covers what to state and what to ask first.
- State what the brokerage does that a comparison site does not, as your own facts and without naming anyone, as broker or comparison site describes.
- Add InsuranceAgency markup that repeats the pages, then read the same panel again a month later.
What brokerage principals ask first
We are a captive agent for one insurer. Does any of this apply?
Most of it. State the lines you write, the insurer you represent, where you are licensed, how you are paid and what you do at claim time, in the words your agreement and license use. The markets row is the difference: say plainly that you place with one insurer, so a buyer who wants several quotes knows where they stand. Whether "agent" or "broker" describes you is your license's word.
Can we name the insurers we place with?
The agreement with each insurer, and the rules where you are licensed, settle whether you may name it or show its logo. Where you may, name the insurers on the page for each line they write. Where you may not, state how many insurers you place that line with and which lines have specialist markets behind them, and leave the names out.
Which schema.org type fits a brokerage?
InsuranceAgency, the nearest fit, which schema.org places under FinancialService, a subtype of LocalBusiness; there is no separate type for a broker. Give it the name, address, telephone, opening hours and areaServed, point feesAndCommissionsSpecification at the page that says how you are paid, describe each line as a Service, and list licensed staff as employees with their licenses. Leave rating markup out.
Our quote form is the main thing on the site. Is that enough?
For a buyer who has already chosen you, perhaps. For one who has not, the form says nothing: the lines, the markets, the licenses and the claims help are what a question about a broker turns on, and a form states none of them. A form built as a script may also reach a fetcher that runs no scripts as an empty page. Keep it, and put the facts beside it in text.