AI search, plainly

Schema is not for Google any more

Structured data used to earn a rich result. Now it decides whether you survive the cut.

For fifteen years, JSON-LD was a way to get stars and sitelinks in a search result. It was decoration on top of ranking. That is no longer the only job, and for a lot of small businesses it is not the important one.

How a page actually reaches an answer

The mechanism is worth understanding once, because every piece of advice below follows from it. When an assistant answers a question, roughly this happens:

1. It retrieves candidate text — either from a search index it built earlier, or by fetching pages live when you ask.
2. Those pages are split into chunks: headings, paragraphs, list items, table rows.
3. Chunks are compared against the question by meaning, and a handful are selected.
4. The answer is written from what was selected. Anything not selected may as well not exist.

Step two is where most websites quietly lose. A chunk that says "we come to you, usually within the hour" contains no business name, no city, no service — so it is a weak match for "emergency plumber in Al Barsha" even if the page it came from is a strong match. Retrieval does not reward the page; it rewards the chunk.

What changes when the entity is explicit

An entity block gives a model a stable thing to attach the loose chunks to. Concretely:

• Identity survives chunking. The Organization node states the name, the type of business and the location, so the model does not have to infer them from surrounding prose.
• Facts stop being duplicated and start being declared. Opening hours, phone number, price range and service area stated once, in a machine-readable form, cannot contradict the copy.
• Your pages become each other's evidence. sameAs and internal references let a model corroborate one page against another instead of treating each as a stranger's claim.

The three nodes most small businesses need

Organization or LocalBusiness

On the homepage. Name, URL, logo, sameAs to your real profiles, and for local businesses the address, phone, opening hours and area served. This is the node that makes the rest of the site legible.

Service or Product

On each service page, naming the thing you sell and the area you sell it in. One per page, matching the page's actual subject — a mismatch here is worse than nothing.

FAQPage

Only where you genuinely answer questions on the page. It pairs with question-shaped headings, and it is the closest thing to telling a model "this block is the answer".

What to avoid

• Do not mark up facts that are not on the page. Anything a model can check costs you more than it earns.
• Do not claim ratings, review counts or prices you cannot show on the page.
• Do not paste the same boilerplate block onto thirty pages — one node per page, about that page.