Machine-Readable Business Information
Your website contains a great deal of information about your business. Your homepage mentions your name, your about page describes your services, your contact page lists your address and phone number. But this information is written for human readers. It is unstructured text that humans can parse easily but machines must interpret.
JSON-LD — JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data — is a way of embedding structured, machine-readable information directly in your web pages. It tells AI systems, search engines, and other automated systems exactly what your business is, what it does, where it operates, and how to contact it.
Why It Matters for GEO
Gemini, Google's AI system, draws heavily from brand-owned websites as a citation source. When Gemini evaluates your business, it reads your website. JSON-LD makes that reading easier and more accurate.
Without JSON-LD, an AI system must infer your business category from the text of your pages, guess your service area from mentions of city names, and piece together your contact information from wherever it appears. With JSON-LD, all of that information is provided explicitly in a format the machine can parse directly.
The result is a more accurate, more complete representation of your business in AI recommendations.
The LocalBusiness Schema
The most important JSON-LD schema for local businesses is LocalBusiness. It allows you to specify your business name, address, phone number, website, hours of operation, price range, accepted payment methods, service area, business category, and dozens of other attributes.
A complete LocalBusiness schema implementation removes ambiguity about what your business is and where it operates. This is particularly valuable for AI systems that are trying to match your business to specific queries.
FAQPage Schema
FAQPage schema marks up your FAQ content in a way that AI systems can directly cite. When you implement FAQPage schema, you are essentially providing AI systems with a structured set of questions and answers about your business that they can use directly in responses.
This is one of the highest-leverage schema implementations for GEO. AI systems are frequently asked questions — "does this business offer emergency services?", "what is the typical price range?", "how quickly do they respond?" — and FAQPage schema gives them the answers directly.
Review Schema
If your website displays customer reviews, Review schema allows you to mark them up in a machine-readable format. This makes your on-site reviews visible to AI systems as a citation source, supplementing the reviews on third-party platforms.
Implementation
JSON-LD is implemented as a script tag in your HTML, typically in the head section or at the bottom of the body. It does not affect the visual appearance of your page. It is invisible to human visitors but fully readable by machines.
The schema.org vocabulary defines the properties available for each schema type. LocalBusiness, for example, has over fifty defined properties. You do not need to implement all of them — focus on the properties most relevant to your business and fill them in accurately and completely.
Accuracy matters. Inaccurate schema — wrong hours, outdated address, incorrect business category — can create confusion for AI systems and undermine the trust signals you are trying to build.