Structured data: the invisible code AI reads about your business

A visitor reads on your contact page that your business is based in Kortrijk and closed on Saturdays. A program has to infer that from layout, menus and loose sentences. It can get it wrong. Structured data removes that doubt. It is a piece of code in your page, invisible to the visitor, that describes the same details in a fixed format. Search engines read that code. An AI service that fetches your page receives it too.

What schema.org and JSON-LD are

The vocabulary almost everyone uses is called schema.org. According to schema.org's own explanation, it was set up by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. Since 2015 it has been developed further in a community group at W3C. Schema.org defines how you describe a business, an address, opening hours or an article, so that every machine understands the same thing.

You can add that vocabulary to a page in several ways. In its introduction to structured data, Google recommends JSON-LD, because it is the easiest for website owners to add and maintain. JSON-LD is a block of text in the code of your page, separate from what the visitor sees. You do not need to change your design for it.

The four types an SME needs

LocalBusiness describes a business with a physical location. In its documentation on LocalBusiness, Google lists two required properties: the name and the address. Recommended properties include the phone number, opening hours, geographic coordinates and the URL. More specific types exist, such as a dental practice, an electrician or an accounting firm. Choose the type that fits best.

Organization describes your company as a whole. According to the documentation on Organization, this code on your homepage helps Google understand the administrative details of your organisation and distinguish it from other organisations. For a Belgian SME that is useful: you can include your official name, your logo and your company number. With the sameAs property you point to your profiles on other sites, such as LinkedIn or a review site.

FAQPage marks up a page with questions and answers. Be realistic here: according to its documentation on FAQPage, Google now only shows the expandable questions in search results for well-known, authoritative government and health sites. For an SME it therefore yields no extra display in Google. The code remains a clear description of which question belongs to which answer.

Article is for blog posts and news items. According to the documentation on Article, this code helps Google better display the title, images and dates of the article. Useful properties are the author, the publication date and the date of the last modification. Those last two show an AI service how current your information is.

An example

This is what a concise LocalBusiness block looks like for a fictitious business:

`` <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Electrician", "name": "Voorbeeld Elektro", "url": "https://voorbeeld.be", "telephone": "+32 56 00 00 00", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "Voorbeeldstraat 1", "postalCode": "8500", "addressLocality": "Kortrijk", "addressCountry": "BE" }, "areaServed": "West-Vlaanderen", "sameAs": ["https://www.linkedin.com/company/voorbeeld"] } </script> ``

The details in this block must match exactly what is on the page itself. Code that claims something different from the visible text undermines the trust of every machine that reads both.

What Google says about it

Google is clear on two points. Structured data makes a page eligible for a richer display in search results, with no guarantee that this display will appear. In the same introduction, Google does mention an example: Rotten Tomatoes saw a 25% higher click-through rate on pages with structured data.

For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google writes in its explanation of AI features that you do not need to add any special schema.org data to appear in them. For AI answers, structured data is therefore an aid without priority. It remains one of the clearest ways to record your basic details unambiguously. That benefits every service that reads your site to describe your business.

What we come across in practice

We work from Ghent for SMEs across Flanders and often see three problems on their sites. The code is missing entirely. It was once added by a plug-in with default values that are no longer correct, such as an old address or the wrong type of business. Or it appears twice on every page, with conflicting details. A check with Google's testing tool or the schema.org validator quickly exposes these errors.

What you can do now

• Test your homepage in Google's Rich Results Test or the validator at validator.schema.org and see which types are found.
• Compare what the code says with what is on the page: name, address, phone number, opening hours.
• Make a list of your profiles on other sites, so they can be added as sameAs to your Organization data.

We add and check this code in our one-off optimisation. If you also want to manage your customer data internally in one place, our sister agency hetaibureau.be can help you with that.