Structured data (schema markup)

In practice

Human visitors never see it. It sits in the page's code and labels the content: this text is a FAQ answer, this is a price, this is a business with these hours in this city. Search engines use it to build rich results (the star ratings, FAQs, and business panels you see on Google), and AI tools use it to describe you without inferring from prose. The vocabulary is an open standard, schema.org ^[1], and Google documents how it uses it ^[2].

It's one of the concrete walls an AI hits when it can't figure out a company. When a site has no structured data, there's nothing machine-readable stating what the company does, where it operates, or who it serves, so the machine guesses, and often guesses wrong or picks a competitor it understands better.

For a B2B or industrial site the high-value markup is unglamorous: Organization (name, location, contact), Product or Service for what you make, FAQ for the questions you answer, and Review or LocalBusiness where they apply. You don't need to mark up everything; you need to mark up the facts you want an answer engine to get right.

Structured data is the mechanical layer under answer engine optimization and AI search optimization: it's how you tell a machine which sentence is the answer and which entity is your company. Good writing makes content quotable; structured data makes it unambiguous.

You can check any page in a couple of minutes with Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator: paste a URL and see what structured data, if any, it finds. On most industrial sites the answer is "none," which means every machine reading the page is guessing at the basics.