Structured data: helping Google (and AI tools) understand your business

When a human reads your page, they immediately understand that it’s a restaurant, with an address, opening hours and a 4.7 rating. A bot has to guess this from the text. Structured data gives it this information in a standardised, unambiguous format. Invisible to visitors, it can make a real difference in search results.

What is structured data?

It’s information added to your pages’ code using a common vocabulary, schema.org, shared by Google, Bing and other engines. The format Google recommends is called JSON-LD: a small block of code that describes the page without changing how it looks.

What it’s for

• Better understanding of your business: type of business, address, service area, opening hours, services.
• Getting rich results: a product’s price and availability, breadcrumbs, information about an event or a recipe.
• Linking information together: your website, your Google profile, your social media, your authors.
• Feeding AI tools: answer engines also rely on clear, structured information. See our article on visibility in ChatGPT and AI tools.

The useful types for a small business

LocalBusiness and its variants

It’s the most important for a local business. There are precise types: Restaurant, Dentist, LegalService, RealEstateAgent, Plumber, Store… Give the name, address, phone, opening hours, service area and links to your official profiles. This information must be strictly identical to that in your Google Business Profile.

Organization

To describe your business: logo, contact details, social media. Useful for the knowledge panel that can appear when people search for your name.

Product

Essential for an e-commerce website: price, currency, availability, average rating and number of reviews. This information can appear in the results and in the Shopping tab. See our Shopify SEO guide.

BreadcrumbList

Breadcrumbs replace the page’s raw address with a readable path in Google results. Simple to set up and useful on every website.

Article

For blog articles: title, author, publication and update date. An identified author strengthens your content’s credibility.

Event

For a venue or business that organises events: date, location, price, ticket availability.

The rules that have changed

• FAQ: since 2023, Google only shows expandable questions in the results for a limited number of official websites (government, health). The markup remains valid and helps understanding, but don’t expect special display.
• Reviews of your own business: the stars you give your own business on your website aren’t shown in the results. They remain possible for products.
• Golden rule: structured data must describe what’s visible on the page. Marking up missing or false information can lead to a manual action from Google.

How to test it

1. Use Google’s rich results test to check the types eligible for rich results.
2. Use the schema.org validator to check all your markup.
3. Keep an eye on the “Enhancements” section of Search Console, which reports errors detected across the whole website.

How to set it up

On WordPress, SEO plugins generate some of it automatically, often generically. On Shopify, it depends on the theme. On a custom website, it’s built directly into the code, page by page, allowing precise, complete markup. That’s what we do on all our websites, like the one you’re reading right now.

Want to know whether your website makes good use of structured data? It’s one of the points our free SEO audit checks. To understand the other technical foundations, also read our article on SSR rendering and SEO.