What it does and does not do
Structured data is a public standard. It does not push you up a ranking, it is not proprietary to any vendor, and it does not submit you anywhere. Google is explicit that it enables certain result types rather than acting as a ranking factor, and the same logic applies to assistants: it makes the facts easier to extract, not more important.
The reason it still matters for AI answers is that ambiguity is the thing that quietly kills you. An assistant deciding whether the business on your site and the business in a directory are the same entity is doing exactly the kind of matching that unambiguous, machine-readable facts make trivial.
The fields worth filling in
- The exact business name, matching your Business Profile character for character.
- Address, or areaServed if you are a service-area business with no walk-in location. Choose one and be consistent.
- Telephone, in the same format everywhere.
- Opening hours, kept current. Wrong hours in structured data are worse than none.
- sameAs links to your profiles, which is how you assert that all of those listings are the same business.
- A services list, if you offer distinct services people search for individually.
The three ways people get this wrong
- Marking up facts that contradict the visible page or the Business Profile. That is worse than having no markup, because you have now published a disagreement in a machine-readable format.
- Using a generic type when a specific one exists. Schema.org has specific local business types for many trades. The more specific type is a stronger statement.
- Adding it once and never updating it. Hours change, phone numbers change, and stale structured data becomes a confident source of wrong facts.
Do this after, not before
If you have not yet written one page per service or fixed your Business Profile category, do those first. Structured data describes what is there. It cannot describe pages you have not written.
A LocalBusiness block you can adapt
Paste this into the head of your homepage and replace every value. Keep it consistent with what a visitor can see on the page, and with your Business Profile.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Plumber",
"name": "Smith Plumbing",
"url": "https://example.com",
"telephone": "+1-916-555-0142",
"email": "office@example.com",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "120 Riley Street",
"addressLocality": "Folsom",
"addressRegion": "CA",
"postalCode": "95630",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"areaServed": [
{ "@type": "City", "name": "Folsom" },
{ "@type": "City", "name": "El Dorado Hills" },
{ "@type": "City", "name": "Rancho Cordova" }
],
"openingHoursSpecification": [
{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
"opens": "07:00",
"closes": "17:00"
}
],
"sameAs": [
"https://www.google.com/maps/place/your-profile",
"https://www.yelp.com/biz/your-listing",
"https://www.facebook.com/your-page"
],
"hasOfferCatalog": {
"@type": "OfferCatalog",
"name": "Services",
"itemListElement": [
{ "@type": "Offer", "itemOffered": { "@type": "Service", "name": "Water heater replacement" } },
{ "@type": "Offer", "itemOffered": { "@type": "Service", "name": "Sewer line repair" } },
{ "@type": "Offer", "itemOffered": { "@type": "Service", "name": "Emergency leak repair" } }
]
}
}
</script>- Replace the @type with the most specific schema.org type for your trade. Plumber, Dentist, Electrician, HVACBusiness, RoofingContractor and many others exist.
- Use either address or areaServed as your primary claim, matching how your Business Profile is set up. Service-area businesses without a storefront should lead with areaServed.
- Fill sameAs with the profiles you actually control. This is the line that ties your listings together as one entity.
- Check that every value here also appears as visible text somewhere on the site. Invisible claims are the most common cause of a warning.
- Validate it with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator before you ship, then re-validate after any hours or phone change.
One block on the homepage is enough for the business itself. Individual service pages benefit more from a clear heading and a direct first answer than from more markup.
You are looking for the term
Structured data
This is what people mean by structured data or schema markup, and the broader goal of being understood as a consistent entity across sources is called entity SEO. Vendors who describe their markup as proprietary are describing a public standard with a price tag attached.
- Will schema markup alone get me into AI answers?
- No. It removes ambiguity from facts you already publish. If the facts are thin, unambiguous thin facts are still thin.
- Do I need an llms.txt file too?
- It is a proposed convention, cheap to add, and there is no published evidence it changes whether assistants recommend you. Add it if it costs you ten minutes, but do not buy it.
- 01Local business structured dataGoogle Search Central
- 02LocalBusiness type definitionSchema.org
- 03Site names in Google SearchGoogle Search Central
- 04The llms.txt proposalllmstxt.org
Every link above was opened and confirmed reachable on September 1, 2026.
The automated version
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