Structured Data

Structured data is machine-readable markup added to a web page that states, in a shared vocabulary, what the page is about: which business, at which address, open at which hours, selling what. A program reads the markup instead of guessing from the prose.

One vocabulary, three ways to write it

The vocabulary is almost always schema.org, a set of types such as LocalBusiness, Product and FAQPage, each with named properties. It can be written three ways. JSON-LD is a block of JSON placed in a script tag, separate from the visible page. Microdata and RDFa attach attributes to the HTML elements that already carry the text. Google’s structured data documentation accepts all three and says JSON-LD is usually the easiest to implement and maintain, which is why nearly every page builder emits it.

The markup makes no claim visible to a reader. It repeats what the page says in a form a parser can check field by field, so a name, a phone number and a street address arrive as labeled values rather than as a paragraph that might contain them.

Describing the business or describing the website

Presence is not the problem. Of 9,483 small-business sites this site audited, only 17.8% carried no schema.org markup at all. What the rest carried was mostly WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList and ImageObject: types the page builder writes for itself, describing the software and the page rather than the company. LocalBusiness or a specific business type appeared on roughly a quarter of sites, and a further 13.7% had business schema with the fields that would make it usable left empty. The figures are this site’s own audit, written up in what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler.

The useful test for any block of markup is therefore which entity it is about. A page that says WebPage and nothing else has told the machine that a page exists. A page that says LocalBusiness with a name, address, telephone, opening hours and area served has told it who is speaking.

A common question

Does structured data make an AI assistant recommend a business?

Not on its own. Markup settles identity: it tells a program which business a page belongs to and where that business is, so a mention can be attributed without ambiguity. It does not supply the answer-shaped passage the assistant quotes, and a page with complete LocalBusiness markup and no answers on it still gives the assistant nothing to lift. Markup and citable text are two separate jobs.

Sources

Formats and vocabulary: Google’s introduction to structured data, schema.org and the JSON-LD 1.1 specification. The schema-presence figures are this site’s own, computed from its audit records; sample drawn per metro and trade, not from a random frame.