The structured data that actually matters now

Somewhere between "add schema markup" and "stop worrying about it" sits most of the advice a small visitor economy business gets about structured data. Neither version is wrong exactly. It is just advice written for nobody in particular, and it rarely says which facts are worth the afternoon.

Here is the plainer version. Structured data is a second copy of a handful of facts about your business, written in a form a machine can read without guessing, sitting quietly inside the same page a visitor already sees. Opening hours already on your contact page in words. Your location already on a map embed. The star rating already shown next to your reviews widget. Structured data is those same facts, repeated once more in a format with no ambiguity in it, so that anything reading the page does not have to work out what "open till late on Fridays" means.

Most website themes do not add this for you, because they cannot know your opening hours or your coordinates in advance. That is the actual reason it is so often missing. It is not an oversight on the operator's part, and fixing it does not need a redesign.

The facts worth adding

Four are worth an afternoon for a visitor economy business, in roughly this order.

Opening hours, written as a structured list of days and times rather than a sentence. "Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 till 5" is clear to a person and ambiguous to a machine, which cannot tell whether that excludes bank holidays or means something different in winter.

Location, as proper map coordinates rather than just an address string. An address can be read several ways. A latitude and longitude pair cannot.

What kind of place you are. A specific type (a bed and breakfast is a different thing from a self-catering cottage, a visitor attraction a different thing from a working farm) rather than a generic business listing, so that something trying to match a visitor's request to your business has an accurate category to match against.

Genuine reviews and a rating, where you actually have them, pulled from wherever you collect them rather than invented or rounded up. Structured data for ratings is meant to reflect real reviews, and the properties exist to describe counts and averages that genuinely happened. Writing in a number that is not backed by real reviews behind it is not a shortcut worth taking, on a website or anywhere else.

Each of these already exists somewhere on most websites, in sentences. The work is restating them once, in the plain structured format, not inventing them from nothing.

The one that stopped paying off

For a while, the standard advice included FAQ schema: mark up your common questions and answers, and Google would sometimes show them directly in the search results as an expandable list. That used to be a reasonable use of an afternoon.

It no longer is, at least not for that reason. Google retired FAQ rich results from Search entirely on 7 May 2026, and by August had removed the related reporting from Search Console as well (Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal). The change affects every site, including the health and government sites that had kept the feature the longest. The markup itself is still valid and Google's crawler still reads it; it simply no longer produces anything extra to look at in search results.

Leave existing FAQ schema in place if you already have it. It costs nothing to keep and other systems may still make some use of it. It is just no longer the first place to spend new effort, which is the opposite of what a lot of still-circulating advice says.

How to check what you already have

View the source of your homepage (right click, "view page source", not just the rendered page) and search it for the text application/ld+json. If that phrase appears, you already have some structured data, and the next question is only whether it covers the four facts above. If it does not appear at all, nothing has been added yet.

Google's own Rich Results Test (search for it, paste in your homepage address) will read what is there and tell you plainly which of these properties it found and which it did not, without needing to understand the code yourself.

Getting it added without writing code

If your website runs on a platform like Squarespace, Wix or WordPress, search that platform's own help pages for "structured data" or "schema markup" alongside your platform's name. Several have a setting or a well-reviewed plugin that fills in opening hours and location from information you already enter elsewhere, rather than needing it written by hand.

If a developer or agency built your site, this is a short, specific brief to forward rather than a vague one: the four facts above, written once as JSON-LD, added once, finished in well under an hour of their time.

Why it is worth doing even though nobody can promise a result

Nobody, including anyone selling a tool to do this for you, can tell you precisely how much weight any one AI system gives structured data over the same facts written in plain sentences. What can be said plainly is that it removes ambiguity at no cost and no risk: a machine reading your page no longer has to guess whether you are open today, where exactly you are, or what kind of place you are. That is a small, finishable piece of work, which puts it in useful company with checking your robots.txt file: not glamorous, not a guarantee of anything, but the kind of thing worth being able to say you have actually done.

Read more

• Google to no longer support FAQ rich results (Search Engine Land)
• Google drops FAQ rich results from search (Search Engine Journal)
• Is your website accidentally blocking AI?
• What we found in 39 visitor economy websites