What Are Schema.org and Structured Data?
Structured data is machine-readable code that presents the information on your page in a labelled form that search engines and AI systems can understand without guessing; Schema.org is the standard vocabulary for those labels, developed jointly by Google, Microsoft and other major players. A human reads "Mon–Fri 9:00–18:00" on your page and infers opening hours from context; for a machine, the same fact only becomes certain when it sits in an "openingHours" field. JSON-LD is the format — officially recommended by Google — that carries this information in a single script block without touching the page's appearance. This tool supports three common schema types: LocalBusiness (a business with a physical address), Organization (a company or brand) and FAQPage (up to 5 questions and answers).
The New Visibility: Search Engines + AI Assistants
People now ask "web agency near me" or "is this company legit" not only to Google but to AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. These assistants draw on the web to compose answers, and structured data makes the facts on your site the easiest possible meal for them: extracting a phone number from free-flowing prose takes interpretation, reading it from a "telephone" field takes none. Clearly labelled name, address, phone and service details raise the odds that your business appears both in classic search with rich results (stars, FAQ accordions, business panels) and in AI answers under the right name with the right facts. This practice is called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and it is the natural extension of SEO: the same principle — make the machine's job easy — applied to the new answer engines.
How to Use It
- Pick the schema type: LocalBusiness for a business with a physical location, Organization for a general company identity, FAQPage for question-and-answer content.
- Fill in the fields: business name, website, phone, address and (for LocalBusiness) opening hours; question-answer pairs for FAQPage. Optional fields left empty are simply omitted from the code.
- Copy the code: paste the ready script block into your page's head section (or the body — Google reads both).
- Validate: enter your page's address into Google's Rich Results Test to confirm the schema is recognised.
Which Type, When?
- LocalBusiness: restaurants, salons, clinics, shops, offices — any business a customer can physically visit. Address and opening hours are especially valuable here; they are the raw data behind "near me" searches.
- Organization: location-independent brands, online service providers, software companies. It pins down your official name and contact details at the machine level.
- FAQPage: questions and answers that visibly appear on your page. It can earn an expandable FAQ view in search results, and it is exactly the pre-digested Q&A format AI assistants love to quote.
Example: the Neighbourhood Bakery
Let us make it concrete: you run a bakery in Kadıköy. You pick the LocalBusiness type and enter the name, website, phone, address and opening hours in the "Mo-Sa 08:00-20:00" style. The tool packages those facts into a script block with the field names of the Schema.org vocabulary, and you add the block to your home page's code. From then on, a search engine or assistant asked about "bakery in Kadıköy" can read your address and whether you are open right now from labelled data instead of guessing. Five minutes of work permanently lowers the risk of machines relaying your business details wrong.
Tips and Rules
- Mark up only what is visible on the page: Google treats schema content that does not appear on the page as a guideline violation. FAQPage markup belongs on a page whose FAQ is actually shown.
- NAP consistency: name, address and phone must match letter for letter across your site, your Google Business Profile and the schema. Inconsistency erodes the trust of search engines and AI alike.
- The right schema per page: Organization/LocalBusiness on the home page, FAQPage on the FAQ page; copying the same schema onto every page is unnecessary.
- Update the schema when facts change: after a move or new opening hours, stale schema becomes the source of wrong answers.
- No rich-result guarantee: schema makes you eligible; Google decides whether to show the rich result. Machine-readable clarity still pays off either way.
Why It Matters
The definition of visibility on the web has widened: your page now "appears" not only in lists of blue links but in voice assistant answers, AI-generated search summaries and chatbot recommendations. The common language of all these new surfaces is structured data — and most of your competitors are not using it yet. Nothing you enter is stored on the server; the code is generated on the fly and returned only to you. Manage the bot access that crawling your schema depends on with our robots.txt Generator, and to plan structured data strategically across your whole site, have a look at our SEO optimisation service.