Organization schema: how to tell Google and AI who your business is

Organization or local business schema: which type fits your business?

Organization schema is a short block of code, usually on your home page, that states who your business is: its name, website, logo, contact details and official profiles. A buyer who asks an AI assistant about you may get an answer built from your site, a Yelp page and an Instagram account. The markup is your own statement that these are one business, in a form a machine can read without guessing. Whether each assistant reads that statement is a separate question, answered further down.

The first decision is the type. Google’s Organization documentation (updated September 8, 2026) recommends “the most specific schema.org subtype” that matches you. On schema.org, LocalBusiness is itself a kind of Organization, defined as “A particular physical business or branch of an organization”. Our quick test: can a customer walk into it?

Do you need both Organization and LocalBusiness? For one location, we read the documents as no. Google’s LocalBusiness page (updated September 8, 2026) says: “Since LocalBusiness is a subtype of Organization, we recommend following the fields for Organization” as well as its own. One block can carry all of it, and neither page asks a one-location business for two.

The tradesperson. Google’s LocalBusiness page requires an address, “The physical location of the business”, while its Business Profile guidelines tell a service-area business to “hide your business address from customers”. We found no Google page that reconciles the two. Our suggestion: use the trade as the type, such as Plumber, and give the city, state, postal code and country without the street. Schema.org’s areaServed can state where you work, though Google’s property lists do not include it. Run the result through the Rich Results Test.

The storefront with a web shop. Google has one sentence for “an ecommerce site” and another for “a restaurant or a physical store”, and none for both. Our suggestion: describe what most customers use. If they walk in, use a LocalBusiness subtype on the home page. If they buy online, use OnlineStore there and a Store block on each shop’s own page.

What does a complete block look like for a local business?

Birchline Dental is invented, and its address, phone number and links are placeholders. Its website footer shows this text:

Birchline Dental
100 Example Ave, Suite 4, Portland, OR 97205
(503) 555-0142
hello@example.com

The block states the same name, address and phone:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Dentist",
  "name": "Birchline Dental",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "logo": "https://www.example.com/images/logo.png",
  "description": "Family dental practice in Portland, Oregon.",
  "telephone": "+1-503-555-0142",
  "email": "hello@example.com",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "100 Example Ave, Suite 4",
    "addressLocality": "Portland",
    "addressRegion": "OR",
    "postalCode": "97205",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "geo": {
    "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
    "latitude": 45.52317,
    "longitude": -122.68183
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
      "opens": "08:00",
      "closes": "17:00"
    }
  ],
  "priceRange": "$$",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.facebook.com/example",
    "https://www.instagram.com/example",
    "https://www.yelp.com/biz/example-portland"
  ]
}
</script>

Each line, and what to check:

Google says of Organization that “There are no required properties”; name and address are what LocalBusiness needs to be eligible as a rich result. Fill in what is true and leave out the rest.

Google’s structured data policies (updated July 10, 2026) say: “Don’t mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page.” So your name, address, phone and hours belong on the page as text too. The tag itself is the subject of our guide to JSON-LD, and the other types a business site can use are in our guide to schema markup.

What is the shorter version for an online-only business?

A business with no premises has no street address to state. Google marks “address” as “if applicable” on Organization, and accepts a physical or a mailing address. If you have neither to publish, leave it out rather than inventing one. Fernway Goods is also invented:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "OnlineStore",
  "name": "Fernway Goods",
  "alternateName": "Fernway",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "logo": "https://www.example.com/images/logo.png",
  "description": "Online shop for refillable household cleaning products.",
  "contactPoint": {
    "@type": "ContactPoint",
    "contactType": "Customer Service",
    "email": "help@example.com",
    "telephone": "+1-503-555-0177"
  },
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/example",
    "https://www.youtube.com/@example"
  ]
}
</script>

• @type. OnlineStore is Google’s recommendation for an ecommerce site. Other online businesses use OnlineBusiness.
• name and alternateName. Google says: “Use the same name and alternateName that you’re using for your site name.” The second is a short form people really use.
• @context, url, logo and description. The same rules as the local example.
• contactPoint. Google calls it “The best way for a user to contact your business”. Drop the phone line if you have no public number.
• sameAs. The profiles you run, covered next.

Online shops can also state return and shipping policies at this level.

What does sameAs schema do, and which profiles belong in it?

The sameAs line answers one question: which other pages on the web are this same business? Schema.org (version 30.1, dated September 16, 2026) defines it as “URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item’s identity”, with a Wikipedia page, a Wikidata entry or an official website as examples. Google’s Organization page describes “a page on another website with additional information about your organization”, such as a profile on a social media or review site, and allows several.

Neither page says which profiles to pick, so these lists are our suggestion.

List these:

• Your main social profiles: the accounts your business logs in to and posts on.
• A Wikipedia page or Wikidata entry, if one already exists and is really about you. Do not create one to fill this line.
• A profile you have claimed on a review site or industry directory, such as Yelp or your trade’s own register.

Leave these out:

• Personal profiles, including the founder’s. They identify a person, not the business.
• Old or unofficial accounts, such as a dormant page or one a fan set up.
• Listings you cannot edit, or ones with wrong details: you would be pointing machines at the error.
• Single posts, press articles and pages that only mention you. They do not “unambiguously” indicate who you are.
• Pages on your own site. Google’s words are “on another website”.

Why the profiles should link back. Neither Google nor schema.org mentions this, so it is our suggestion. A sameAs line is a claim you make about yourself, and any site can list any profile. A profile whose website field points to your domain confirms the claim from the other side, so a person or a machine can check it in both directions. Whether Google or any assistant makes that check is not published.

To check, open each profile, confirm its website field shows your exact domain, and confirm your footer links to the same URLs the block lists.

Should your name, address and phone match everywhere?

Yes, though what Google writes down is narrower than the rule you may have heard.

We found no primary source saying that organization schema markup must match your Business Profile character for character, that “St.” against “Street” costs you anything, or how any AI assistant treats two spellings of one name. So these steps are our suggestion, not a published rule. A name written differently in each place gives a reader, human or machine, one more thing to work out.

• Write one reference card: the name on your sign, the address in one format, the phone in one format.
• Put the legal form, such as LLC, in legalName, which Google describes as the registered name if “different from the name property”. Keep it out of name unless your sign carries it.
• Compare the card with your footer and Contact page, the markup, your Google Business Profile, your social profiles and the main directories of your trade.
• Correct each difference at its source. When you move or change number, work through the same list on the same day.

One location or several: where does each block go?

Google is direct about the home page: “We recommend placing this information on your home page, or a single page that describes your organization, for example the about us page. You don’t need to include it on every page of your site.” For LocalBusiness it is looser: “You can add LocalBusiness structured data to any page on your site, though it may make more sense to put it on a page that contains information about your business.” And for more than one place: “Define each local business location as a LocalBusiness type.”

One block per location and a url that is “The fully-qualified URL of the specific business location” come from Google. How they fit across home and location pages is our suggestion: Google does not lay out that split. A business with several offices customers do not visit can use one Organization block: Google says you “can provide multiple addresses”.

Three details for chains:

• Keep the home page about the brand (our suggestion). In one of our test rounds a chain’s home page carried one branch’s block, and our checker first read that branch as the whole business. Other readers may do the same.
• Keep the name the same. Google’s Business Profile guidelines say: “All business locations within the same country must have the same name for all locations”, with exceptions for locations that consistently use a different name.
• Tie each branch to the brand if you like. Schema.org has parentOrganization for this. Google’s property lists do not include it, so treat it as optional.

Does AI read this markup? What is known

Google’s guide “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search” (updated July 10, 2026) covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, and says:

“Structured data isn’t required for generative AI search, and there’s no special schema.org markup you need to add. However, it’s a good idea to continue using it as part of your overall SEO strategy, as it helps with being eligible for rich results on Google Search.”

The same guide does name something for local businesses: “Using products like Merchant Center (such as Merchant Center feeds) and Google Business Profiles can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results.” So for a business with a location, the identity tool Google names for AI responses is the Business Profile, not the markup. If neither is done, our suggestion is to start with the profile.

The others say less. We looked on November 4, 2026. OpenAI’s crawler overview, Anthropic’s crawler help page and Perplexity’s crawlers page do not mention structured data, and we found no statement from any of the three on whether ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity reads it. Two small outside tests point to little effect: searchVIU, a maker of SEO software, saw none of five AI systems use a price given only in JSON-LD on one test page (October 2025), and Ahrefs saw “no major uplift” in citations on 1,885 already-cited pages that added schema (May 2026). Neither covers a page AI does not yet cite. Google’s guide covers Search features, and we found no statement about the Gemini app. Microsoft Advertising wrote on October 8, 2025 that schema “helps search engines and AI systems understand your content”; its examples do not include who a business is.

So nobody outside these companies can say whether this block changes what an assistant says about you. Silence is not evidence either way: a bot that reads your HTML receives the script tag with the rest of the page, and what it does with it is unpublished.

Do not expect a knowledge panel from it either. Google says the logo line can help it understand which logo you want, “for example in Search results and knowledge panels”, and also: “Google does not guarantee that features that consume structured data will show up in search results.”

The case for doing it is modest. Google says it “can help Google better understand your organization’s administrative details and disambiguate your organization in search results”, it costs little, and writing it makes you settle one record of your own facts. Finding out what the assistants actually say about you is a separate job, covered in our guide to AI brand monitoring.

How many business sites get their identity right?

On November 4, 2026 we ran the MWY checker on 32 hand-picked business sites. That is not a sample of the web, so read this as what we saw, not as a market figure.

Partial on the first row means a block exists but lacks at least one of the three. Partial on the second means only one half is there.

Of the 21 items scored on every site, only one passed less often than the first row: address and phone written as text, at 8 of 32. Profiles came fourth from the bottom. For contrast, 31 of the 32 passed the robots.txt item for AI search bots. In this round, far more sites were open to the bots than stated who they are.

Where the figures come from

• searchVIU: “Schema Markup and AI in 2025”, tested October 30, 2025, on one page about a fictional product. searchVIU sells SEO software, and its post counts its own tests in more than one way.
• Ahrefs: a study published May 11, 2026 of 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD between August 2025 and March 2026, against 4,000 control pages, on citations in AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT over 30 days. Ahrefs sells SEO software too, and says the schema often came with other changes it could not separate.

Both are vendors’ own work, so read them as hints, not rules.

What the MWY checker does and does not do about your identity

The free AI visibility checker reads your home page and up to 7 inner pages as raw HTML, without running JavaScript, and scores 24 items, these three among them. It shows your score, each group’s score and the 5 items that matter most, so an identity item appears only if it is one of those 5. Pro opens soon. It will show all 24 items, with a JSON-LD snippet filled in from what the checker found on your site, for you to check line by line. That snippet starts from the plain LocalBusiness or Organization type, so choosing your subtype stays with you.

The checker does not:

• judge whether you picked the most specific type
• count markup added by JavaScript after the page loads
• open your profiles, confirm they are yours or check that they link back
• read your Google Business Profile or any directory
• compare the address and phone in the block with those on the page
• validate the block against Google’s rules: use the Rich Results Test and validator.schema.org for that

It also does not promise that adding this block will make an assistant name your business. It shows what your site states about you today, so you can correct it.