GuideWhen the buyer asks an AI
Structured data
Definition
Facts about your business written into a page’s code in a standard vocabulary that machines parse without guessing: the company’s name and address, or a product and its price. It is what gets read when the reader is a machine.
How it works
A crawler reading prose has to infer which string is the company and which number is the price; markup declares the facts outright, in the schema.org vocabulary, invisible to visitors and plain to machines. Search engines assemble richer listings from it and use it to connect company, people, products and pages into one entity, and assistants read the same declarations. It needs no new content and sits entirely under your control, which makes it the cheapest item on this list to get right. The one requirement is agreement: the markup must state what the visible page states.
What to watch for
Markup drifts. A plugin installed years ago may still declare a previous address or a price from an old campaign, so read what your pages claim today; the search engines publish validators that show you. Any fact the visible page contradicts is a live risk, because engines cross-check what they read. Their guidelines class self-serving mismatches, invented review stars above all, as spam; markup asserting a different address than the page shows is worse than carrying none. If nobody on the team can say where the markup is generated, treat everything it claims as unreviewed.
The question you ask
“When did we last read what our own markup claims, and does it match the page?”