Schema & Structured Data Checker
See the JSON-LD schema on your homepage, what each type signals to search and AI engines, and where the gaps are.
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Understanding structured data
Structured data (JSON-LD schema) is code added to your pages that tells search engines and AI assistants exactly what your business is, what you offer, who you serve, and what people say about you. Without it, they have to infer all of that from your text alone, and they often get it wrong. About 44% of pages across the web have some structured data. Most small business sites have none.
Source: HTTP Archive Web Almanac, 2024.
What schema markup should a small business website have?
At minimum: Organization (who you are and how to contact you), WebSite (your domain and search function), and Service or LocalBusiness (what you offer and where). From there, AggregateRating lets you display star ratings in search results, and FAQPage helps tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity pull your content when someone asks a question your page answers. Each type you add is another signal that makes you easier to cite and trust.
How does structured data affect AI search?
Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews pull from pages where they can confidently extract structured facts. Schema makes that extraction easy and unambiguous. A site with clean Organization and Service schema is more likely to be cited when someone asks an AI tool who does X in their area, compared to a site with identical text but no markup. This is one of the clearest levers available for appearing in AI-generated answers.
What is the difference between schema and meta tags?
Meta tags control how your page previews in search results and social shares: the title, description, and thumbnail image. Schema tells engines what the content means, not just what it looks like. Both matter for visibility. Schema is increasingly important as AI assistants decide whether to cite your business, because it gives them machine-readable facts rather than prose to interpret.
What is JSON-LD and do I need to edit code to add it?
JSON-LD is the format Google recommends for structured data. It lives in a script tag in your page's HTML and does not change anything visitors see. Most CMS platforms can generate basic Organization and WebSite schema automatically (WordPress via Yoast or RankMath, Shopify, Squarespace). For more specific types like FAQPage or Service, you typically add a small script block to your page template.
This checker flagged validation issues. Does that actually matter?
Yes. Invalid schema is often silently ignored by search engines. They read what they can and discard the rest. The fields that break most often, like ratings, event dates, and product prices, are exactly the ones Google and AI systems use to understand your business. Fixing a validation error is usually a small change with a real payoff.
Related guides and checklists
Keep going with hands-on guides and a checklist you can work through on your own site.