What is schema markup, and does my business need it?
The short answer
Schema markup is hidden, structured information in a page that tells search engines and AI assistants exactly what they are looking at — that this is a restaurant, these are its hours, this is a price. It does not change what visitors see. It matters increasingly because assistants answer from structured facts, and a page without them is harder to quote confidently.
On this page
What it is
A page of text is unambiguous to you and ambiguous to a machine. "Open 9 to 5" — is that a business's hours, a quotation, a film title? A human knows instantly. Software has to guess.
Schema markup removes the guess. It is structured data added to the page — invisible to visitors — that labels the facts: this is a LocalBusiness, this is its openingHours, this is its address, this is a Review with a rating of four.
Why it is coming up now
Search engines have used it for years to build rich results — the star ratings, opening hours and FAQ dropdowns you see in search.
The newer reason is AI assistants. When an assistant answers "is that café open on Sunday", it is more confident repeating a labelled fact than a sentence it had to interpret. Structured data is not a requirement for being cited, but it makes you easier to cite correctly — and easier to cite is the whole game.
What it does not do
It is not a ranking trick. Adding schema does not push you up the results by itself. It makes existing content legible, which is different.
It does not make untrue things true. Marking up a rating you do not have is a policy violation with real consequences. The data must match what is on the page.
It is not visible. If you are hoping for a visual change to your site, this is not it.
What is worth having for a small business
Roughly in order of value:
- LocalBusiness, or its specific subtype — Restaurant, HealthClub, HairSalon — with name, address, phone, opening hours and price range
- Menu, Service or Product, whichever describes what you sell
- FAQPage for pages that genuinely answer questions
- Review and AggregateRating, only where you have real reviews to point at
- Event, if you run them
- BreadcrumbList, which helps search show where a page sits
When it is already there
Structured data is the sort of thing that gets skipped on a custom build because nobody asked for it by name and it is invisible when missing.
Helm sites ship with it — business details, opening hours and page structure marked up as standard, so the facts on your page are labelled for search engines and assistants without anyone remembering to request it.
How to get it
If your site runs on a platform, this is often a setting or a plugin rather than a job. If it was custom-built, it is a small task for whoever built it — worth asking for by name, because it is frequently skipped.
Then check it. Google's Rich Results Test will tell you what it can read from a given URL, and it takes a minute. A schema block with a typo fails silently, which is the worst way for anything to fail.