Schema.org structured data

Schema.org is the dominant standard for embedding structured data in HTML. Created jointly by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex in 2011, it provides a vocabulary of types (Organization, LocalBusiness, Person, Service, Article, FAQPage, etc.) and properties (name, address, openingHoursSpecification, priceRange, etc.) that can be embedded in pages as JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa.

For small businesses, the most important Schema.org types are LocalBusiness (name, address, geo, openingHoursSpecification, telephone, priceRange, image), Organization (the legal entity, with sameAs cross-references to Wikipedia/Wikidata/LinkedIn for entity disambiguation), Service (each offering with provider and areaServed), and Person (the owner or key staff with credentials and sameAs).

Google's own documentation requires only name and address for LocalBusiness, but recommends the full set including geo at 5+ decimal places, specific subtype (Restaurant, Dentist, DaySpa, etc.), and aggregateRating only when reviews are first-party. Schema validates at search.google.com/test/rich-results.

Schema.org markup appears in JSON-LD format inside a script tag with type "application/ld+json" — it does NOT render visibly to users. AI assistants and search engines parse it server-side to understand the entity-graph of the web. A page with full Schema.org markup is significantly easier for ChatGPT to cite confidently than a page with only natural-language descriptions.