AI Visibility
Structured Data, Explained Without the Jargon
By the LA Web Design team6 min read
A web page looks obvious to a person and ambiguous to a machine. A human sees a phone number; software sees a string of digits that might be a phone number, a price, or a date. Structured data is a small block of code that removes the guessing. It labels the parts of your page so search engines and AI assistants know what they're reading.
What it actually looks like
It's a short script in the page's code, invisible to visitors, written in a standard vocabulary that every major search engine agreed to use. It says things like: this is a local business, this is its address, these are its hours, this is a review with this rating, this is an article published on this date.
The types that matter for most businesses
LocalBusiness covers your name, address, phone, hours, and service area. Service describes what you offer. Review and AggregateRating carry your ratings. FAQPage marks up questions and answers. Article handles blog posts. BreadcrumbList explains where a page sits in your structure. Most businesses need four or five of these, not thirty.
What you get out of it
Two things. First, rich results — the star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, and business details that take up more room in search results and pull more clicks than a plain blue link. Second, and increasingly the bigger one: AI assistants use structured data to understand and summarize businesses. When something answers “who does epoxy flooring near me,” it's drawing on sources it can parse confidently.
Where it usually goes wrong
Three failures are common. Markup describing something that isn't actually on the page, which search engines treat as a violation. Markup that drifts out of date, where hours changed on the page but not in the code. And markup added by three different plugins that contradict each other. Structured data that lies is worse than none at all.
Don't hand-write it page by page
If it's added manually to individual pages, it will fall out of date the first time something changes. It should be generated from the same information that fills the page, so updating your hours once updates everything. That's an architecture decision, and it's worth making early.
How to check yours
Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator will both read a live address and report what they found and what's broken. Run your homepage, a service page, and an article. If those tools can't find anything, nothing else can either.
It's plumbing, not magic
Structured data won't make a weak page rank. It makes a good page legible — to Google, to Bing, and to the assistants a growing share of customers now ask instead of searching. It's one of the few technical jobs with a clear payoff and a finite amount of work.