Make sure search engines and AI know who you are: business information and schema

Search engines and AI assistants recognise your business more reliably when your name, address, contact details and description match everywhere: on your website, in the Business Register, in your Google Business Profile and on social media. Organization schema on your home page or about page puts those details in a fixed format that software reads directly. Conflicting details make your business harder to describe correctly.

What do we mean by “knowing who you are”?

A search engine works with pages and with entities: recognisable things such as a business, a person or a product, each with properties and relationships. Your business is one of those entities. Its name, address, logo, what it does and where it operates are its properties.

A system gathers those properties from several sources. Your own website is one. Your Business Profile, your LinkedIn page, entries in industry directories and articles about your business are others. The better those sources agree, the smaller the chance of confusion with another business or of outdated details in an answer.

Why does conflicting information cause problems?

Take an example: an installation company in Apeldoorn was called “Jansen Installatie” until last year and is now called “Jansen Warmte & Klimaat”. The website uses the new name. The Business Profile still has the old name and an old phone number. LinkedIn lists a branch in Deventer that has already closed.

A customer looking for the company sees three versions. So does a search engine or AI assistant. Which name goes with which phone number? Is Deventer still open? The system has to choose, and its choice will not necessarily be the one you would make.

In its guidance on AI features and your website, Google explicitly mentions keeping your Merchant Center data and your Business Profile up to date. Other AI services do not describe exactly how they combine business details. Consistent details are the part you control yourself.

Which details belong on your own website?

Start with your own site, because you have full control over it. For businesses in the Netherlands, legal rules apply as well.

What Dutch law requires. According to the government portal Business.gov.nl, your website shows, among other things, your email address, a phone number or chat option and your physical address (unless your visiting address is hidden in the Business Register). If you sell products or provide services online, you also show your KVK number (your registration number with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce) and your VAT identification number. For online sellers, the KVK also lists the company name as registered, the address where the business is located and the days and times you can be contacted, and suggests showing these details on every page, for example in the footer.

What helps recognition. An about page that says in plain language what your business does, for whom, in which area and how you work. Use the same description as in your profiles elsewhere. How to show experience and expertise there is covered in E-E-A-T: showing experience and expertise.

Where else does your business appear?

Work in a fixed order, so you always start from one source:

Review these sources once a quarter, or after every change:

Start with name, address and phone number, known together as NAP. More on that under NAP consistency. Your Business Profile has its own guidelines from Google, which we cover in Google Business Profile and local visibility.

What is Organization schema?

Organization schema is structured data that describes your business. According to Google’s documentation, the markup helps Google understand your organisation’s administrative details and tell your business apart from other organisations with a similar name. Some properties, such as the logo, can also appear in search results and in the knowledge panel.

Google makes no property required. Add whatever applies to your business. Place the markup on your home page or on one page that describes your business, not on every page.

Which fields should you fill in?

Google lists these recommended properties, among others:

Google recommends making sure you provide at least a name or alternateName, an address or phone number, and a url or logo.

sameAs deserves attention. Schema.org describes it as the URL of a page that clearly indicates the identity of the item. Only include profiles that are certainly about your business and show the same details. A LinkedIn page with an old name in sameAs adds to the confusion instead of reducing it.

Which type should you choose?

The general type is Organization. For most businesses, a more specific type fits better:

• Online shop without a physical shop: for e-commerce sites, Google recommends OnlineStore over OnlineBusiness.
• Business with premises that customers visit: use the most specific subtype of LocalBusiness, such as Restaurant or another type that fits your business. According to Google’s LocalBusiness documentation, name and address are required there.
• Online shop with a returns policy: nest the returns policy in your Organization with hasMerchantReturnPolicy. Google recommends that location over a returns policy in every product’s markup.

What does an example look like?

An invented example for an invented business. The JSON-LD block sits in the HTML of the home page, in a script element of its own:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Jansen Warmte & Klimaat",
  "legalName": "Jansen Installatietechniek B.V.",
  "url": "https://example.nl",
  "logo": "https://example.nl/logo.png",
  "description": "Heat pump and ventilation installer in Gelderland.",
  "telephone": "+31 55 000 0000",
  "email": "info@example.nl",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "Voorbeeldstraat 1",
    "postalCode": "7300 AA",
    "addressLocality": "Apeldoorn",
    "addressCountry": "NL"
  },
  "vatID": "NL000000000B01",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/example"
  ]
}
</script>

Every detail in this markup must also be visible on your site and match your profiles.

Which mistakes come up?

Most mistakes don’t happen when the markup is first filled in, but later: after a name change, a move or a new plugin. The JSON-LD block often lives in the theme or in a setting, and nobody thinks of it when the text on the site is updated. So run through these points after every change to your business details.

How Outseen approaches this

In an Outseen audit, we review the agreed pages and topics on their content, which can include how your business is described and how that fits with your profiles. Atlas, Outseen’s own research engine, examines the public code of the fetched pages, such as titles, descriptions, language and headings, and records for each finding what was found on which URL and when. What your profiles outside your website say falls outside that technical check. More about the wider work is on our GEO page.

What does this mean for your business?

Start with the details themselves, not with the markup. Decide once what your official name, trading name, address or service area, phone number and short description are, and use exactly that text everywhere. Only then add Organization schema to your home page or about page, with details that are also visible on the site.

Set a regular moment to review your profiles, and in any case do it straight after a move, a name change or a new phone number. An old listing that stays online will otherwise simply keep being used by search engines and AI assistants. How AI assistants choose their sources is covered in how do AI assistants decide which websites to mention?