Schema markup

Schema is how you stop making machines guess. A human reads your contact page and infers what is name, what is address, what is opening hours; a crawler parsing raw HTML gets no such certainty unless the markup states it. Structured data has long powered Google's rich results, but its AEO value is broader: unambiguous facts serve any system building an answer about you, and the entity clarity it provides, especially Organization markup connecting your name, site and profiles, feeds the identity resolution every engine performs. The priorities for a small business are short: Organization on the site, LocalBusiness where physical presence matters, FAQPage where you answer questions, Article with real authors on content. Two rules keep it useful: mark up only what is visibly true on the page, and treat it as housekeeping. We have seen no good evidence that schema on its own raises AI citations or mentions; the content the markup describes is what gets quoted.