Schema markup: the business owner's guide
Machines don't infer — they read. Schema is how you hand search engines and AI platforms the facts about your business in a format they can't misread.
Schema markup is a block of code on your pages that states facts — who you are, what you offer, where you operate, what customers ask — in a standard format machines trust. It powers rich results in Google, feeds knowledge graphs, and gives AI platforms quotable facts instead of guessable prose. Five types cover most businesses.
The five types every business needs
Organization / LocalBusiness
Who you are: name, logo, address, phone, hours, and sameAs links to your profiles. The anchor record everything else hangs off — and the source AI checks for basic facts.
Service
What you offer and where: one Service entity per page with a plain description and areaServed. Turns "we do lots of things" prose into discrete, quotable offerings.
FAQPage
Real customer questions with 2–3 sentence answers. The single most AI-friendly markup — these Q&As are pre-formatted for answer engines to lift.
Review / AggregateRating
Marked-up genuine reviews feed star ratings in results and give AI verifiable reputation evidence. Only mark up reviews that actually appear on the page.
BreadcrumbList
Tells machines how your site is organised, which helps them understand what each page is about and how topics relate — quiet but useful.
How to add it (three routes)
DIY: generate a LocalBusiness block with our free schema generator and paste it into your CMS's head/custom-code field. Plugin: most WordPress/Shopify/Wix setups have schema plugins — fine for basics, but audit what they output; auto-generated markup is often incomplete or wrong. Professional: for Service, FAQ and Review markup across a whole site, mapped to a deliberate entity strategy — that's our Schema Markup Implementation service.
The three rules
1. Never mark up what isn't on the page — schema that contradicts visible content erodes trust and risks manual penalties. 2. Validate everything — one syntax error and the whole block is ignored; use Google's Rich Results Test. 3. Keep it current — stale schema (old hours, dead services) actively feeds machines wrong facts. Schema is a statement of record, not a set-and-forget plugin.
Related: entity SEO & knowledge graphs — where schema fits in the bigger picture.
Playbooks by industry
Which schema types matter most varies by business. These playbooks cover the markup and evidence each industry needs.
Keep reading:the AI search glossary, how Google AI Overviews work, and agency vs DIY.