In plain terms
A human reading your contact page sees an address, a phone number and opening hours and understands them. A machine sees text. Schema markup restates the same facts in a format the machine reads without ambiguity: “addressLocality: Manchester”, “telephone: …”, “opens: 09:00”. Google, Bing and the AI systems that summarise the web all read it.
It is invisible to visitors. It changes nothing about how the page looks. What it changes is how confidently a search engine can say what the page is and who is behind it, and that confidence is what rich results and AI citations are built on.
What it does, and does not do
- It enables rich results: the FAQ dropdowns under a listing, the breadcrumb trail instead of a URL, the business hours and address in a knowledge panel. Google decides whether to show them; markup makes it possible.
- It connects entities. Marking the founder as a Person, linking to the Organization, linking to the same person’s profiles elsewhere, lets Google build a picture of who is behind the site. That is a large part of what “authoritativeness” means to a machine.
- It helps AI answers. Systems that generate an answer from several pages prefer pages whose facts are unambiguous. Eight of fourteen UK results we checked on 4 September 2026 carried an AI Overview; clear markup is part of being cited.
- It does not, by itself, improve rankings. Google is explicit about that. It makes a page better understood and better presented; it does not make it more relevant.
The five types a small business should carry
| Type | Where | What it says | What it enables |
|---|---|---|---|
| LocalBusiness (or a subtype such as ProfessionalService) | Every page, or the home and contact pages | Name, address or service area, phone, hours, coordinates, price range | Business details in results and panels; consistency with your Google Business Profile |
| Organization with founder | Every page | The business as an entity, its founder (a Person), its profiles elsewhere (sameAs) | Entity recognition; links the brand to the person |
| Person | The about or author page | Name, role, photo, what they know about, profiles elsewhere | Authorship; the E in E-E-A-T attaches to someone |
| Article | Case studies, guides | Headline, author (the Person), date published and modified, publisher | Bylined, dated results; authorship for AI systems |
| FAQPage | Any page with a genuine question-and-answer section | The questions and their answers, exactly as shown on the page | FAQ rich results; quotable answers |
Source: schema.org vocabulary and Google Search Central structured data documentation. This site carries all five; view the source of any page and search for application/ld+json.
Shops add Product and Offer markup, which feeds Google Shopping and the Merchant Centre; the Merchant Centre guide covers that. BreadcrumbList is a sixth worth having on any site with sections. Beyond those, most types are for publishers, recipes and events and do nothing for a service business.
The one type that is a liability
AggregateRating: the stars. It is the most requested markup and the most abused, because it puts a rating in the search result. Google’s guidelines require that any rating marked up is shown on the page and genuinely collected from users of the thing rated; self-serving reviews on a business’s own page are ineligible for the rich result and a manual action follows misuse. Since April 2025 an unverifiable rating is also a consumer-law problem in the UK.
How to check yours
- Paste any page into Google’s Rich Results Test. It lists the types found and any errors.
- Paste it into the Schema Markup Validator at validator.schema.org for a full reading of everything present, including types Google does not show as rich results.
- In Search Console, the Enhancements section reports issues with FAQ, breadcrumb and other markup across the site.
- View the page source and search for “application/ld+json”. Read what it claims. If it claims something the page does not show, remove it.
Adding it
On WordPress the main SEO plugins add Organization, Article and breadcrumb markup with a few settings, and FAQ blocks add FAQPage. Shopify themes carry Product markup. On a custom site the developer writes it once, driven by the same data that renders the page, which is how it is done here: the founder’s details live in one file and every Person, Organization and Article block reads from it. That is also why it stays accurate: there is nothing to keep in sync.
