The Short Version
Most schema markup advice written for small businesses is a list of types to add, and the three types usually sitting at the top of that list stopped doing what the advice says they do.
- FAQPage rich results were cut back on August 8, 2023 to "well-known, authoritative government and health websites." For everyone else, Google said they "will no longer be shown regularly."
- HowTo rich results were removed entirely about a month later, on September 13, 2023.
- Star ratings for your own business are ineligible by written policy whenever you control the reviews — which, on your own website, you do.
What remains is a shorter list than most guides imply, and it is still worth doing. It just buys something more specific than ranking: a better-looking listing, and a machine-readable statement of who you are and what you sell that neither Google nor an AI answer engine has to infer from your paragraphs.
This page covers what still earns something, what no longer does, and the rules that disqualify the markup you do ship. Every claim here is quoted from Google's own documentation, because this is a topic where secondhand advice ages badly and most of what is published about it was written before 2023.
What Structured Data Does, Stated Precisely
Structured data is a block of machine-readable code — usually JSON-LD, which is what Google recommends "if your site's setup allows it" — that states explicitly what a page is about. The page says "Open Monday to Friday, 8 to 5" in a paragraph; the markup says the same thing in a format that needs no interpretation.
Google's framing of what that buys you is worth reading literally. The general structured data guidelines say that markup "enables a feature to be present, it does not guarantee that it will be present," and that "Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results."
The strongest evidence for that framing is in the penalty. Google describes the consequence of abusing structured data this way: "A structured data manual action means that a page loses eligibility for appearance as a rich result." Eligibility for a feature — not position in the results. If markup were a ranking input, misusing it would cost rankings. It costs rich results instead.
So the honest summary: structured data is a click-through lever and a machine-readability lever. It does not move you from position 9 to position 4. It changes what position 9 looks like, and it removes guesswork for every system that reads your site without a human in the loop.
The Types Worth Shipping on a Small Business Site
| Type | Where it goes | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
Organization / LocalBusiness | Site-wide, usually in the layout | A clean statement of name, address, phone, hours and logo. Only name and address are required properties. No visible rich result for most businesses — this one is about being understood, not decorated. |
BreadcrumbList | Every interior page | The visible breadcrumb trail shown in place of the URL in the result. Low effort, genuinely visible, and it is the type most often missing. |
Article | Blog posts and guides | Better title text, image and date handling. Google's documentation notes "there are no required properties" for Article, so this one is hard to get wrong. |
Product | Product pages only | Price, availability and star ratings in the result. This is the one place review stars are straightforward — see ecommerce web design. |
Event / JobPosting | Only if you really have them | Dated events and job listings hosted on your own site. Skip unless the content exists; markup for events you do not run is a policy violation, not an optimization. |
Everything else in Google's structured data gallery — Recipe, Movie, Dataset, Vacation rental, Math solver, Course list — belongs to publisher categories a local service business is not in. A plumber does not need twenty-five types. A plumber needs three.
The Three You Were Probably Told to Add First
FAQPage
The August 2023 announcement is unambiguous: FAQ rich results "will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites," and for other sites they "will no longer be shown regularly."
Which raises a fair question about this very page, since it ships FAQPage markup. The reason is not a rich result. It is that the markup costs nothing to emit, Google explicitly says unused markup causes no harm, and a clean question-and-answer structure is useful to the reader and to the AI systems now summarizing pages — the same reasoning behind llms.txt and AI crawlers and the broader shift covered in generative engine optimization.
What is not worth doing is adding an FAQ section to a page that does not need one, written to be marked up rather than to be read, in the hope of a dropdown that is no longer available to you.
HowTo
Gone. Google's September 14, 2023 update stated that "as of September 13, Google Search no longer shows How-to rich results on desktop." Support was dropped from the Rich Results Test and the enhancement report 30 days after that, and from the Search Console API within 180 days. Any guide still telling you to add HowTo markup for step-by-step rich results was written before that and never revised.
Review stars on your own business
This is the one that costs small businesses the most wasted effort, because the policy is specific and most people have never read it. Google's review snippet documentation says:
"If the entity that's being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, their pages that use
LocalBusinessor any other type ofOrganizationstructured data are ineligible for star review feature."
Two details matter. First, it applies whether the reviews live in your own markup or arrive through an embedded third-party widget — routing them through a reviews plugin does not change who controls them. Second, the same documentation says ratings for local businesses "must be sourced directly from users," and lists LocalBusiness and Organization as supported "only for sites that capture reviews about other local businesses" and organizations. A directory can show stars for the businesses it reviews. A business cannot show stars for itself.
The stars you see beside local results come from the Google Business Profile, not from site markup. So the work that actually produces them is collecting real reviews on that profile — which is the subject of Google Business Profile optimization and part of what local SEO is for, not something a developer can add to your HTML.
Markup for Retired Features Is Dead Weight, Not a Liability
Google has said this twice, plainly. On the 2023 FAQ and HowTo changes: "there's no need to proactively remove it," because "structured data that's not being used does not cause problems for Search." On the sitelinks search box, removed on November 21, 2024: "While you can remove sitelinks search box structured data from your site, there's no need to do so."
For the sake of being checkable, we did remove the search-box markup from this site — and the reason is a useful distinction. It was not removed because the feature retired. It was removed because the search URL it named did not exist on this site and returned a 404. Markup pointing at a real page for a feature nobody renders is harmless. Markup pointing at a page that is not there is a different kind of wrong, and worth fixing.
The Rules That Disqualify Markup You Did Ship
Google's general structured data guidelines are short. These are the ones small business sites break:
- Visible content. "Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page." This is the most commonly violated rule by a wide margin, and almost always by a plugin.
- True representation. "Your structured data must be a true representation of the page content." Marking up "irrelevant or misleading content, such as fake reviews or content unrelated to the focus of a page" is named explicitly.
- Completeness. "Specify all required properties listed in the documentation for your specific rich result type." Google also advises that "it is more important to supply fewer but complete and accurate recommended properties" than to fill every optional field with guesses.
- Location. "Put the structured data on the page that it describes." Site-wide identity markup belongs in the layout; page-specific markup belongs on that page.
- No deception. "Don't use structured data to deceive or mislead users."
The practical version for a small business: the single most common violation is a plugin generating an aggregateRating, a price, or an opening-hours block that appears nowhere on the page a visitor sees. The audit is not hard — open the markup, open the page, and confirm every claim in the first appears somewhere in the second.
Where the Markup Lives, and How It Breaks
There are three ways a site ends up with structured data, and they fail differently.
A plugin writes it. Fastest to install and the most likely to emit claims your page does not make, because the plugin is filling a template from whatever fields it can find. If this is your setup, the useful work is auditing what it already emits rather than adding more.
Someone pasted JSON-LD into the template. Accurate the day it was written, and the first thing to go stale. If your phone number lives in two places — the footer and a block of markup — one of them will eventually be wrong, and it will be the one nobody looks at.
It is generated from one source. The markup reads the same record the visible page reads, so the two cannot disagree. This is the only arrangement that survives a redesign, and it is why Google's rich result status reports exist at all: they are there to catch pages whose markup "might break after deployment due to templating or serving issues."
That third approach matters most on pages generated from a list — products, locations, a service catalog, an events calendar. When the page and the markup both read one record, correcting a price or an address is one edit in one place, which is the same argument behind owning the data layer your pages are built from rather than maintaining two copies of the truth. Keeping it correct as the site changes is ordinary maintenance work, and it is part of what website automation covers.
How to Check It
Three tools, in this order, because they answer three different questions.
Is it valid? Schema.org's own Schema Markup Validator at validator.schema.org. It checks the vocabulary itself, including types Google has no rich result for, which makes it the right tool when the Rich Results Test reports nothing.
Is it eligible? Google's Rich Results Test. It uses the rendered source code, accesses the page as Google-InspectionTool rather than with your login, and defaults to the smartphone user agent. One caveat worth internalizing: it reports only the rich result types Google currently supports, so "no items detected" may mean a retired feature rather than broken markup.
Is it working in the real index? The rich result status reports in Search Console. This is the only one of the three that reflects pages Google has actually crawled, and the only one that will tell you when a deploy quietly broke something that validated fine in testing. Check it after any template change, which is why validated structured data sits on our website launch checklist rather than in a later optimization pass.
What We Ship on Every Build
Every site we build ships JSON-LD from eight components covering seven types: Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, Article, FAQPage, Service and Person. They are typed against the published schema.org type definitions, so an invalid property is a build failure rather than a surprise in a validator six months later, and the business facts — name, address, phone, hours — come from one configuration file, so the markup cannot drift away from the footer.
That is not a competitive advantage so much as a floor. It takes an afternoon to set up once and then costs nothing per page, which is why it is included in the $1,500 build rather than sold as an add-on. Monthly plans start at $20 and cover keeping it accurate as the site changes.
If you want to know what your current site is emitting before deciding whether any of this needs work, that is part of what we look at in a free consultation — and if the answer is that your markup is fine, we will say so.
If You Only Do One Thing Today
Run your homepage through the Rich Results Test, and read what it found rather than what it warns about.
If it reports LocalBusiness or Organization with an address and hours that match your Google Business Profile character for character, your foundation is sound and everything above is optimization. If it reports an aggregateRating you did not know you had, that is the one to go remove today — it is not earning you stars, and it is the one item on this page that can actually cost you something.