Schema markup is a block of structured data on a page that tells a search engine what it is looking at, rather than leaving it to work that out from the words. A phone number in a paragraph is text that has to be interpreted. The same number inside an organisation block is a fact that can be repeated. For most business websites, four types do almost all of the useful work, and the long tail of other types can be ignored without losing anything.
The four that earn their place
Organization, or LocalBusiness if the business has a location customers visit. This carries the name, address, phone number, opening hours, coordinates and links to your profiles elsewhere. It is the single most useful block on a business site and the one most often missing.
Service or Product, depending on what is being sold, so each page states plainly what it offers and who provides it.
Article or BlogPosting on anything you publish, with a real date and a named publisher, so the page says plainly who wrote it and when.
BreadcrumbList, which lets Google show a readable trail such as Home, Services, Local SEO under a desktop result instead of a raw address. Google stopped showing breadcrumbs on phones in January 2025, so it does less than it did, but it still tells a machine where a page sits in the site.
The ones worth adding when they apply
FAQPage, only where the questions and answers are visible on the page. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026, so this no longer makes a listing any bigger. It still states your questions and answers as clean pairs that a machine can read without guessing. Marked up questions that a visitor cannot see are a violation, not a shortcut.
Review and AggregateRating, with two warnings. Google stopped showing stars for a business marking up reviews of itself on its own website in 2019, so on your own organisation or local business pages it earns nothing. Where it does apply, on a product for example, it must describe real reviews that are visible on the page. Ratings marked up with nothing behind them are a common reason for a manual penalty.
Event, JobPosting and Recipe if the business really has those. They produce dedicated result types and they are worth doing properly or not at all.
Why it matters when the boxes are gone
Rich results were the visible reward, and Google has been trimming them for years. FAQ boxes are gone, breadcrumbs no longer show on phones, and review stars stopped showing for a business describing itself back in 2019.
The reason that has grown instead is AI answers. A model deciding whether to name a business can take a fact from a schema block as stated, rather than inferring it from a sentence and hoping it read it right.
That can be the difference between being mentioned and being skipped, and it costs nothing beyond adding the block once.
How to get it wrong
Marking up things that are not on the page. Everything in the schema has to correspond to something a visitor can see. This is the rule that gets sites penalised.
Letting it drift. Schema is usually added once and then forgotten, so the phone number changes on the page and not in the block. Generate it from the same source the page uses and this cannot happen.
Adding every type available. A page with nine different schema types is not nine times better understood. It is one page trying to be nine things.
Never testing it. Google's Rich Results Test takes a minute and tells you exactly what was read and what was ignored.
Questions people ask
- Does schema markup improve rankings?
- Not directly. It does not push a page up the list. What it does is change how some results look and how confidently a machine understands the page, and both of those affect how many people arrive. For AI answers it matters more, because a fact stated in a schema block is easier to repeat correctly than one worked out from a sentence.
- Can I add schema without a developer?
- On most content systems, yes, usually through a plugin or a built in setting. The part worth a developer is making sure it is generated from the real content rather than typed in a second time, because a second copy is a copy that will eventually disagree with the first.
- Is FAQ schema still worth adding?
- Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026, so it no longer changes how your result looks. If the questions and answers are already on the page, the markup is cheap and harmless, and it hands machines a clean copy of them. Do not add questions to a page just so there is something to mark up.
- Should I add review markup?
- Not for reviews of your own business on your own site. Google stopped showing stars for those in 2019, however real the reviews are. For products, or where you review something else, mark up only reviews that are actually displayed on that page. Rating markup with nothing behind it is penalised by a person, not an algorithm.
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