Two electricians work a few streets apart in Preston. Ask Google or an AI tool the same question and one of them keeps getting named. The other never comes up, and the difference is not the writing on their websites.
Structured data is a small block of code that labels the facts on a page so a machine does not have to guess at them. It does not create a ranking, and Google says it is not required for AI answers. What it does is settle the details a system has to be sure of first: the trading name, the address, the hours, the phone number and the type of work. A system unsure of those details will usually leave a business out of an answer rather than risk getting it wrong.
That is the commercial part. A machine unsure of your number does not ring it, and does not hand it to a customer either.
It is a label attached to information a person can already see on the page. Your trading hours sit in the footer. A human reads “Mon to Fri, 8am to 5pm” and understands it. A machine sees a run of characters. Structured data tells it which part is an opening time, which part is a closing time, and which days they cover. The same applies to a phone number, an address, a price and a service name.
Google supports three formats and recommends JSON-LD. It sits in a script block and touches nothing a visitor sees. Add it, remove it or change it, and the page looks identical.
The vocabulary is not Google’s. It comes from schema.org, a standard Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex set up together. Any system is free to read it. Whether a given system does is a separate question.
Fewer than a plugin will offer to add. For a business with a shopfront or a service area, the useful set is short.
LocalBusiness is the main one. Google requires two properties for it: the business name and the address. Everything else is recommended. Google asks for the most specific sub-type available, so a workshop uses AutoRepair, a clinic uses Dentist, and a shop uses Store. A business that does several things can list several types together.
Organization describes the business as a whole. Google’s advice is to put it on one page, the home page or the about page, rather than site-wide. Beyond name and address, the properties worth filling in are the plain ones: hours, phone number, map coordinates and a price range.
| What it labels | What it tells a machine | What it can produce in Google | Worth it for a small business |
|---|---|---|---|
| LocalBusiness, and sub-types such as AutoRepair or Dentist | Name, address, and what kind of business this is | Business details in the knowledge panel and local results | Yes. Start here. |
| Organization | The business as an entity, its logo and contact points | Logo and business details in search | Yes, once, on one page |
| Trading hours (a property, not a type on its own) | Standard hours, late nights and seasonal closures | Hours in Google’s business details | Yes, and keep it matched to the Google Business Profile |
| Review and AggregateRating | Ratings and written reviews | Star ratings, but not for reviews of yourself | No. See below. |
| FAQPage | Which block of text is a question and which is its answer | Nothing in Google Search since May 2026 | Optional. No display benefit. |
| Breadcrumb | Where a page sits in the structure of the site | The path shown above a result on desktop | Low effort, small gain |
| Article | Author, publication date and headline on a post | Article results and byline dates | Yes, if you publish regularly |
Most of the work is describing the business itself, not decorating individual pages. One accurate LocalBusiness block beats six half-finished ones.
Because Google retired it, and the way it did says something about the whole category.
FAQ markup used to produce an expandable list of questions under a search result. In August 2023 Google cut eligibility back to well-known government and health sites. On 7 May 2026 it stopped showing the result for everyone. The documentation came down on 15 June 2026. The last piece, support in the Search Console API, goes this month.
The markup itself was not withdrawn. FAQPage is still a valid schema.org type, and code already sitting on a site does not break anything. Only the display feature ended.
Schema markup and rich results are two different things. One is a label on a fact. The other is a display feature Google can switch off, and does.
This was not a one-off. Google removed the HowTo documentation in September 2023 after that result stopped appearing. In June 2025 it flagged seven more types for retirement. Documentation for course info, estimated salary, learning video, special announcement and vehicle listing came down that September. Practice problem markup followed in January 2026.
The pattern holds each time. A display feature gets scaled up by SEO tools, stops describing pages faithfully, and Google withdraws it. So the useful question is not which code produces stars. It is which facts you want a machine to be certain of. Those outlast the features built on them.
The honest answer is more useful here, and the two big platforms do not say the same thing.
Google’s guide to generative AI features on Search, updated 10 July 2026, lists things you can ignore. Structured data is on the list. Google’s position is that it is not required for generative AI search, and that there is no special schema.org markup to add. It then recommends using it anyway, because it makes pages eligible for rich results.
Microsoft puts the emphasis the other way. At SMX Munich in March 2025, Fabrice Canel, a principal product manager at Bing, told the room that schema markup helps Microsoft’s language models understand content. That covers Copilot. It was said on stage, and reported at the time by Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable.
OpenAI and Perplexity have published nothing equivalent. Anyone who tells you how ChatGPT treats your schema is guessing.
It will not create a ranking. A structured data problem can cost a page its rich result eligibility. It does not change where that page ranks.
It will not make a claim true. Marking up an address does not verify it. If the address is wrong, the code just makes it easier to read.
It does settle ambiguity, and that matters most when your facts disagree. Same job as always, whether the reader is a search engine, a chatbot or a browsing agent. If an old directory listing contradicts your website, the version on your own site is the one you control.
It is a short job, not a project. On most small sites this is a settings screen in a plugin, or an hour with a developer. Worth knowing before anyone quotes a retainer for it.
Four failures come up more than the rest, and none shows as an error on the site.
The code describes something the page does not. Google’s guidelines say not to mark up content that is invisible to readers. The markup has to be a true representation of the page.
Two plugins are both writing it. A theme adds one LocalBusiness block, an SEO plugin adds another, and they disagree about the trading name. A machine finds two answers and trusts neither.
The hours contradict the Google Business Profile. The site gets updated and the profile does not, or the reverse. The profile is what Google shows in Maps, so this one reaches a customer first.
The page is blocked. Google’s guidelines are blunt: do not block structured data pages to Googlebot with robots.txt, noindex or any other access control.
Then there is the review trap. Since 2019, Google has not shown star ratings for reviews a business controls about itself. That covers reviews in your own code and reviews pulled in through an embedded widget, and Google names Google Business reviews and Facebook reviews widgets as its examples. Pages using LocalBusiness, or any Organization type, are not eligible for the star feature. The review carousel on your home page is doing a real job for visitors. It is just never going to produce stars in search.
For Australian health practices the question does not arise. Section 133(1)(c) of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law prohibits advertising a regulated health service in a way that uses testimonials. AHPRA treats a testimonial as a statement or review about the clinical aspects of a service. Comments about parking or wait times are not covered. Reviews about treatment or outcomes are, and putting them into review markup on a clinic website is advertising them. That is the position as at August 2026.
Half an hour, no cost, and no login beyond Search Console.
Run a page through the Rich Results Test. It sits at search.google.com/test/rich-results and answers one question: can Google use this for a rich result?
Run the same page through the Schema Markup Validator. It sits at validator.schema.org and checks the markup against the standard, without Google’s feature rules on top. It catches errors the first tool ignores.
Read the code next to the page. Every fact in the markup should appear somewhere a visitor can see it. If it does not, take it out or put it on the page.
Open your Google Business Profile in another tab. Compare the trading name, address, phone number and hours, character by character. This is where most sites fail, and the cheapest thing to fix.
Check the Enhancements reports in Search Console. They show which types Google has found across the site and which pages have errors. It is the only view that catches one plugin update breaking every page at once.
If someone else built the site, expect markup you did not know was there. Plugins add it by default. They do not ask.
Two things, and neither is a schema type.
The first is the appetite for new machine-readable files. AI visibility keeps getting sold as a new one: llms.txt, then AI-specific markup, then something else. On 15 June 2026 Google added a note to its guide saying Google Search does not use llms.txt files, and that keeping one will neither help nor harm a site. Keep the file if another service wants it. Do not buy it as a strategy. The unglamorous standard already in the page is the one both Google and Microsoft have said they read.
The second is drift. Structured data goes stale in silence. Nothing breaks, no warning appears, and the code carries on describing a business that has moved on. Re-check after a move, a new phone number, a change to trading hours, or a rebuild. Check again after any plugin or theme update.
If you want to know what your site is currently telling machines about your business, that check is where CJ Digital’s AI SEO work starts. Get in touch and we will tell you what is there, what contradicts your Google Business Profile, and what to fix first.
Checked against primary documentation on 9 August 2026: Google Search Central’s local business, organization, review snippet and general structured data guidelines; Google’s guide to generative AI features on Search, updated 10 July 2026; and Google’s own documentation changelog for the retirement dates. The Microsoft statement was made at SMX Munich in March 2025 and reported by Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable. The health advertising rules come from section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and AHPRA’s advertising guidelines. Platforms change these rules without announcing it, so check the date on anything you read about them, including this.
Your rankings will not move, because this was never a ranking factor. You lose eligibility for the search features that depend on it, and you hand the guesswork back. On a site whose details are already consistent everywhere, that costs little. On one where they are not, it costs the one clean version you controlled.
On WordPress, most SEO plugins generate LocalBusiness and Organization markup from a settings screen, and for a lot of small sites that is enough. The part worth paying for is the check afterwards: whether two plugins are writing conflicting code, and whether the code matches the page and the Google Business Profile.
Not for the search result, because it has not produced one since May 2026. A page can still carry a visible list of questions and answers, because customers read them, and existing markup can stay. What it should not be is a reason to bolt question sections onto pages that do not need them.
Not for reviews about your own business on your own site. Google treats those as self-serving and has not shown stars for them since 2019, including reviews brought in through an embedded widget. The stars you see in local results come from the Google Business Profile, not from code on the website.
Once a year is enough for a site that has not changed. Check sooner after a move, a new phone number, a rebuild or a plugin update. None of those produces a warning when it breaks the markup.
