What is Schema markup?
Schema markup is a block of machine-readable data added to a web page — usually as JSON-LD — that tells search engines and AI assistants exactly what the page is about: a business, a product, an article, a review, a set of questions.
Also called: structured data, JSON-LD, rich results markup.
Humans read a page and infer that £95 is a price and "Tue–Sat" is opening hours. Machines guess, and guesses are where rankings quietly leak. Schema removes the guessing: it labels each fact with a type from schema.org so a crawler can store it with confidence.
The practical payoff is visibility. Star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, event dates, breadcrumbs and price ranges in search results are all driven by schema. So is the confidence an AI assistant has when deciding whether to cite you rather than a competitor with vaguer markup.
It is not a ranking cheat code and it will not rescue thin content. It is closer to labelling your stock properly: nothing exciting happens on the day you do it, and everything downstream gets easier.
What to actually do about it
- Add LocalBusiness schema with your real name, address, phone and hours.
- Use Article schema on blog posts, with an author and a published date.
- Add FAQPage schema where you genuinely answer questions on the page.
- Never mark up something the visitor cannot see — that is a manual-action risk.
- Validate with Google's Rich Results Test after any template change.
Every Koo page emits the right schema automatically — LocalBusiness on service pages, Article and FAQPage on posts, BreadcrumbList site-wide — and it updates itself when you change your details, so it can't drift out of sync with the page.
Related terms
Answer engine optimisation (AEO)
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring a website so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews can quote it accurately when someone asks a question.
Local SEO
Local SEO is the work of getting a business found by people searching nearby — in the Google map pack, in "near me" queries and on maps apps — and depends mostly on a complete Google Business Profile, consistent business details across the web, and location-specific pages.
Canonical URL
A canonical URL is the single address you declare as the official version of a page, using a rel="canonical" tag, so search engines consolidate ranking signals on one URL instead of splitting them across near-identical copies.