Dark room setup with code displayed on PC monitors highlighting cybersecurity themes.

11 October 2026

What schema markup actually does for a business website

“Doesn’t our SEO plugin do the schema?” Maybe. Some of it, anyway. Schema markup, or structured data to give it its proper name, is a bit of code that sits behind a page and tells Google exactly what’s on it. Who the business is. Where it trades. What a product costs and whether it’s in stock. Done well, it can make a page eligible for a richer-looking listing. It’s also badly oversold, and a fair bit of what people bought a few years ago has since been switched off.

In brief

It helps Google understand a page and can make it eligible for a fancier listing. Eligible isn’t the same as guaranteed.
FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google altogether from 7 May 2026, and most business sites had already lost them in 2023.
Most businesses need a small, accurate set. Organization or LocalBusiness, breadcrumbs, and Product or Event markup if you sell those things.
Only mark up what visitors can see on the page.

What structured data is, in plain terms

Google’s results are put together by software reading your pages. It reads well, but it still has to guess. Is that string of numbers in the footer a phone number or a VAT number? Is ‘Saturday 9 till 1’ your opening hours or a one-off open day? Structured data takes the guessing out. Google’s docs call it a way of giving ‘explicit clues about the meaning of a page’.

The vocabulary nearly everyone uses comes from schema.org, a shared project set up by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. That’s why ‘schema’ and ‘structured data’ get used as if they’re the same thing.

Google supports three formats and recommends one of them, JSON-LD, where your setup allows it. It’s a block of code tucked into the page that visitors never see. A joiner’s website looks exactly the same before and after. Google just has far less to work out.

What it can and can’t get you

The payoff is what Google calls rich results. Star ratings under a product. Prices and stock levels. Event dates. Your logo beside your business details. They take up more room and they’re harder to scroll past.

But nobody can promise you one. Google’s own guidelines say plainly that it doesn’t guarantee your structured data will show up in search results, even when every property is present and correct. If an agency tells you otherwise, ask them how.

Then there’s AI. You’ll have seen ‘schema for AI search’ packages doing the rounds. There’s no special schema.org markup needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and Google says so on its own page about them. What it does want is structured data that matches the visible text. Piling on more won’t buy you a spot. Our plain-English guide to how SEO works for a business website covers what does help. Nor will markup fix a dull search listing. That’s a separate job, covered in how Google picks your title links and snippets.

The rich results that have gone

This is where plenty of older sites trip up. The big one for business sites is FAQs. For a while, FAQ markup could put a drop-down list of questions straight under your listing, and plenty of sites added it for exactly that reason. Google cut it back to well-known government and health websites in 2023. Then in May 2026 it confirmed the feature no longer appears in Search from 7 May, and it took the documentation down in June. If that markup’s still on your pages, it won’t produce the drop-down any more. The questions and answers themselves can still be useful to the people reading them.

It’s not the only casualty. In June 2025 Google announced it was phasing out several more, including course info, estimated salary, learning video, special announcement and vehicle listing results. Separately, since January 2025 breadcrumbs in the results only show on desktop, because Google found they weren’t much use on phones where they get cut short. So check the date on any schema advice before acting on it.

The types most businesses actually need

The list is short. Google’s guidance leans towards fewer recommended properties, filled in completely and accurately, over lots of half-finished ones.

Organization or LocalBusiness

Organization markup helps Google understand your business details and tell you apart from similarly named firms. There are no required properties, though your name, logo, web address, phone number and postal address are the obvious ones to include. Google suggests putting it on your home page or one page that describes the business.

If customers come to you, LocalBusiness is the more specific option. It needs a name and an address, and it can carry your opening hours, phone number and separate departments. Google asks you to use the most specific subtype you can, so a restaurant would use Restaurant and a day spa would use DaySpa. Keep it matching your Google Business Profile as well. Different opening hours in two places help nobody.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumb markup describes where a page sits in your site, from the home page down through a section to the page itself. It’s quick to add and it mirrors the structure you should have planned anyway. If you haven’t, start with mapping out your website structure before design begins.

Product and Event

Selling online? This is where structured data earns its keep. There are two flavours. Product snippets cover pages where people can’t buy directly, like a product review page. Merchant listings cover pages with a basket, and they can carry shipping costs and return policies too. Run a product feed in Merchant Center alongside the markup if you can, because Google says doing both maximises your eligibility.

Event markup suits theatres, venues and anyone running ticketed workshops. Google updated its event rules in June 2025 and dropped online-only events. Events now have to take place at a physical location and be bookable by the general public. A purely online webinar doesn’t qualify. Neither does a members-only dinner.

Reviews and stars, where people get caught out

Everybody wants gold stars under their listing. Most service businesses can’t get them for reviews of themselves on their own site. Google’s review snippet rules say that if a business controls the reviews about itself, its pages using LocalBusiness or Organization markup aren’t eligible for stars. So a roofer’s testimonials page marked up with a 4.9 rating won’t earn them. Product pages are treated differently, and an online shop marking up genuine customer reviews of a product can be eligible.

In July 2026 Google added a guideline on fake reviews, and on reviews written in exchange for money, discounts, vouchers or free products where that isn’t clearly disclosed. Keep them off the page and out of the markup. Break the structured data rules more generally and Google can take manual action, which means the page loses its eligibility for rich results. Google says that doesn’t affect how it ranks. That’s a lot of grief for some stars. Real reviews shown plainly on service pages built to win enquiries will do more for you.

Testing it and keeping it working

Before anything goes live, run the page through Google’s Rich Results Test. It shows which rich results the page could get and flags errors. The Schema Markup Validator on schema.org checks all the schema.org markup on the page, without the Google-specific warnings.

After launch, Search Console takes over. Its rich result reports sort items into valid and invalid, and a report only appears once Google has found valid markup of a supported type on your site. The URL Inspection tool will confirm Google has picked up the markup on a particular page. Then be patient. Google suggests watching the Performance report for a few months before deciding whether it made a difference.

Markup breaks quietly. A theme update changes a template. A plugin starts adding a second Organization block that contradicts the first. A café changes its winter opening hours on the contact page and nobody touches the code, which still says summer. Google itself warns that markup can break after deployment because of templating or serving issues. A quick check after every major update belongs in the routine, next to the other technical SEO checks you’d be running anyway.

Getting it right without overdoing it

On a typical small business site this isn’t a big job. Find out what your theme and plugins already output. Tidy up anything sold for a feature that’s gone, and any review markup that was never eligible. Add a clean Organization or LocalBusiness block, breadcrumbs, and Product or Event markup where it fits. Test it. Then give it a few months.

If you’d rather someone else handled it, structured data is part of the SEO services we run for business websites, done alongside the wider work of getting the right pages found. Get in touch and we’ll look at what your site’s telling Google at the moment.

Keep reading

Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

Let’s have a chat