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Schema markup is structured data that tells search engines and AI assistants what a page is about in a format they can parse directly. It has quietly become one of the highest-leverage signals for AI visibility: a well-structured page gives ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews something they can cite confidently. You do not need every type. A small, correct subset usually beats a bloated template copied from a forum thread.

Start with LocalBusiness or Organization on your homepage and contact page. Add Service or Product schema on pages that describe something specific you sell. Add FAQ schema where the page actually answers questions, not where someone has bolted a fake FAQ block onto the bottom of a sales page to game search results. Google has been clear about penalising the latter, and AI assistants are getting better at ignoring it.

Validate every change with Google's Rich Results Test before you push it live. Silent errors are worse than no schema at all; they tell crawlers your structured data is unreliable, which is harder to recover from than starting clean.

A few practical rules:

• Let your CMS or a trusted plugin generate the JSON-LD. Hand-editing thousands of lines you cannot regression-test is a recipe for breakage.
• Match the schema to what the page actually shows. Claiming five-star reviews in markup when the page does not display them is a guideline violation.
• Review your schema after any major template change. Designers move blocks; markup gets orphaned.

Where it gets harder

Most Australian SMB sites only need three or four schema types done well. Beyond the basics, schema decisions start to interact with one another: how your Organization links to your Services, how reviews aggregate, how entity properties stay consistent across third-party sources. That is the layer where a specialist earns their fee, because the cost of getting it subtly wrong is invisible until you notice you have stopped being cited. If your diagnostic flags schema gaps that persist after a developer has had a go, that is the right moment to ask for expert input rather than another round of guesswork.