Schema markup
Standardized labels added to a page that spell out what its content actually means — that this text is a price, that one is an address, this block is your opening hours. Search engines and AI models read it directly instead of inferring it from your prose.
Also called: Schema.org
Short answers, before the detail
What is Schema markup?
Standardized labels added to a page that spell out what its content actually means — that this text is a price, that one is an address, this block is your opening hours. Search engines and AI models read it directly instead of inferring it from your prose.
What does Schema markup look like in practice?
A page shows “(252) 555-0142.” A person reads a phone number; a machine reads eleven characters. Schema is how you state that it is the telephone number, of this business, at this address, open these hours.
Where does Schema markup fit?
Schema & Structured Data — The machine-readable labels that tell search engines and AI models what a page is actually about.
In practice A page shows “(252) 555-0142.” A person reads a phone number; a machine reads eleven characters. Schema is how you state that it is the telephone number, of this business, at this address, open these hours.
What schema markup does
Schema markup is a shared vocabulary for labelling what the content on a page means.
A page might display (252) 555-0142. A human reads a phone number. A machine reads eleven characters. Schema markup lets you state explicitly: this is the telephone number, of this business, which is a marine service company, located at this address, open these hours.
The vocabulary is maintained at schema.org and is used by Google, Bing, and — increasingly relevant — the AI systems that assemble answers from web sources.
Why it matters more now than it did
For years the argument for schema was rich results: star ratings and prices in search listings. That argument has weakened as Google has retired result types, most notably FAQ rich results in May 2026.
The stronger argument now is machine comprehension. Systems that answer questions rather than list links need to be confident about facts before repeating them. Structured data is the difference between a model inferring your service area from prose and knowing it because you declared it. It is foundational to being treated as a real entity rather than a page of text.
The types worth implementing
For a local service business, in order of value:
- LocalBusiness — name, address, phone, hours, service area, price range. Non-negotiable, and it belongs on every page, not just contact.
- Service — one per service you offer, with provider and area served.
- BreadcrumbList — replaces the raw URL in search results with a readable trail.
- sameAs — links your social and directory profiles to the business, which directly supports entity resolution.
- FAQPage — no longer produces rich results, still parsed for understanding and still helpful for clean extraction by AI tools.
Product, Event, Review, and Job Posting types matter if you have that content, and not otherwise.
Rules that keep you out of trouble
Only mark up what is visible on the page. Marking up content a visitor cannot see violates Google’s structured data policies and can earn a manual penalty. This is the single most common way schema causes harm rather than help.
Do not invent reviews. Self-serving review markup is explicitly against the guidelines and is one of the most reliably penalized abuses.
Keep it in sync. Schema that says you close at 5pm while the page says 6pm is worse than no schema — you have now given a machine a confident wrong answer to repeat.
Use JSON-LD. It is Google’s recommended format and it keeps the data separate from your layout, so redesigns do not silently break it.
Validate after every change. Run the Rich Results Test. Invalid markup fails silently — nothing breaks visibly, it simply stops being read.
What it will not do
Schema markup is not a ranking factor in itself. It does not push a page up the results, and adding it to thin content will not rescue that content.
What it does is remove ambiguity — making it far more likely that when a system decides to name a business like yours, it has enough confident, verifiable detail to name you.
Related terms
Now that you know what it means — should you be paying for it?
Not every term in this glossary is worth money to every business. Tell us what you are being sold and we will tell you straight whether it is worth it for you.