Anyone doing SEO will mention structured data or schema, and few explain what it is for. Here it is plainly.
The problem it solves
Your page says “we build websites, single-page from 1,499, based in Auckland”. A person understands that instantly.
A machine reads a string of text. It can guess — 1,499 looks like a price, Auckland looks like a place — but guessing produces errors.
Structured data adds a passage to the page written only for machines, stating explicitly: this is a company, this is its name, this is its type, this is the city, these are its services, this is the price range.
It is invisible to visitors. What it changes is how accurately machines understand you.
What it gets you
1. Rich results in search. Results with star ratings, product prices, recipe steps, expandable questions — all produced from structured data. Without it, your result is a title and a description.
To be clear: providing it does not guarantee display. Google decides; you supply the data. So do not treat it as “add this and get stars”.
2. AI is more willing to quote you. Recently important. When an assistant assembles an answer it needs to be confident about facts, and explicitly labelled ones are safer than facts inferred from prose. We covered this separately.
3. It lets machines confirm you are one company. Stating the registered name, registration number and address gives something that corresponds to outside records. The more that can be verified, the lower the bar to citing you.
Worth adding
There are hundreds of schema types and almost none are relevant. For an ordinary business site:
Organisation details. Company name, legal entity, registration number, address, contact, service area, languages. The foundation, and it belongs on every page.
We include our legal entity and NZBN, because the NZBN is checkable on a government register — one verifiable fact outperforms ten adjectives.
Services and prices. What you offer and what it costs. Particularly worthwhile where real figures exist.
Article details. Title, published date, modified date, author. Needed for blog posts.
Breadcrumbs. Where a page sits within the site’s structure.
FAQs. If you have question-and-answer content, mark it up. This type suits AI citation especially well, because it is already shaped as a question and an answer and costs least to restate.
Not worth adding
Ratings and reviews. People want star ratings, but Google stopped accepting self-declared business reviews years ago. Self-applied ratings will not display and may attract manual review. Real reviews belong on a Google Business Profile.
Anything not actually on the page. The thing most worth avoiding. Structured data must match visible content. Declaring 24-hour opening while the page says Monday to Friday is an inconsistency, and serious cases are penalised.
Every type you can find. Pointless. Mark up what you have and what customers care about.
Checking your own
Two free tools, five minutes:
Google’s Rich Results Test. Enter your URL and it reports which types were detected, whether there are errors, and what could produce a rich result.
A schema validator. Stricter, and it flags syntax and field problems.
To see the raw data: view page source and search for application/ld+json. Understanding the JSON is optional; what matters is confirming it exists and that the company name, address and prices in it are correct.
We have found sites carrying a previous owner’s name, an address from before they moved, and prices from three years ago. None of it raises an error, so it stays wrong indefinitely.
The part people miss: keeping it in step
Structured data is a second copy of your page’s content. Change a price, a service range or an address, and it needs changing too.
Easy to miss precisely because it is invisible — updating the visible copy gives no hint that something else is now stale.
We were caught by this. After a price rise the visible copy was updated and another copy of the old figures was not, and it went on producing wrong information for a while before anyone noticed. So “change a price” is now defined here as four places: page copy, structured data, llms.txt, and the AI assistant’s prompt. Missing one produces a contradiction.
And a contradiction costs more than the error itself — when machines find your information disagreeing with itself, they trust all of it less.
Is it worth paying for
The basic types — organisation, services, articles, breadcrumbs — are not much work and most modern builds include them. If your site has none, it is worth adding, but it is one-off work and should not be billed monthly.
Only one part needs ongoing attention: keeping it in step when information changes. That needs no technical skill, only somebody remembering.
On our projects these types are configured by default and updated alongside any change to prices or details. The tools above will tell you within five minutes whether your current site has them and whether they are right.