Schema.org

Schema.org launched in 2011 as a joint project between Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex to solve a coordination problem: without it, every search engine would have kept building its own proprietary structured data vocabulary, and every website would have needed separate markup for each one. Schema.org gave the web a single shared vocabulary instead, one that every major search engine and, now, every major AI system reads the same way.

What Schema.org actually defines

The vocabulary spans hundreds of entity types — LocalBusiness, Person, Event, Product, Organization, and many more — along with the properties each type can carry, things like name, address, telephone, and openingHours. A website that marks up its content using Schema.org types isn't just decorating its HTML; it's declaring, in a format every major crawler already knows how to parse, exactly what kind of thing each piece of content describes.

The type hierarchy

Types nest inside broader types, and more specific types inherit everything the parent type carries plus additional properties of their own:

Thing
  └── Organization
        └── LocalBusiness
              ├── FoodEstablishment
              │     └── Restaurant
              ├── MedicalOrganization
              │     └── MedicalClinic
              ├── EducationalOrganization
              └── LodgingBusiness
                    └── Hotel

A Restaurant is a FoodEstablishment, which is a LocalBusiness, which is an Organization, which is a Thing — and at each step down that chain, the type gets more specific and picks up properties relevant to that specificity. Restaurant can carry servesCuisine and menu, properties that make no sense on a generic LocalBusiness and that a plain Organization type wouldn't even recognise.

Why specificity matters more than it looks

It's tempting to default to LocalBusiness for every local business, since it's broadly applicable and technically correct in almost every case. But using the most specific applicable type instead of the generic parent type gives search engines and AI systems a sharper read on exactly what the business is. MedicalClinic tells a system something LocalBusiness alone doesn't; Restaurant with servesCuisine set to "South Indian" tells it something LocalBusiness or even FoodEstablishment alone can't. The generic type still validates and still works, but it leaves specificity on the table that the more precise type would have captured for free.

How this connects to related schema work

Schema.org is the vocabulary; JSON-LD is one of the formats used to actually encode it into a web page, and by far the most common one in current practice. sameAs, AggregateRating, and Review are all Schema.org properties layered onto a LocalBusiness type to add reviews and cross-platform identity links. FAQPage and QAPage are Schema.org types built specifically for question-and-answer content, distinct from the business-entity types described above. All of it draws from the same shared vocabulary, which is precisely the point of Schema.org existing in the first place — one system, read consistently everywhere.

India context

For Indian local business AEO work, the Schema.org types that come up most often are MedicalClinic, Physician, Dentist, and Pharmacy for healthcare; Restaurant and Hotel for hospitality; EducationalOrganization for coaching institutes and schools; RealEstateAgent for property businesses; and BankOrCreditUnion or LegalService for BFSI and legal practices respectively. Choosing the correct, most specific type from this set — rather than defaulting every business to plain LocalBusiness — is one of the lower-effort, higher-payoff structured data decisions a business can make.

A worked example

Implementing schema for a dermatology clinic, the correct type is MedicalClinic rather than the more generic LocalBusiness, with the medicalSpecialty property set to "Dermatology." That combination is meaningfully more precise than a plain LocalBusiness entry would be, and it's the kind of specificity that both traditional search engines and AI systems reading structured data reward with a clearer read on exactly what the business does.

Related terms: Structured data → · JSON-LD → · LocalBusiness schema → · FAQPage schema → · QAPage schema → · sameAs →

Structured Data & Schema → | GBP Management Services → | AEO Services →