Field guide
Structured data: the part of your website only machines can see — and why it decides if you get recommended
Underneath what visitors see, a website can carry a second layer written only for machines: structured data. It states, in a standard format, the facts of your business — name, services, area served, hours, address. Most small-business sites don't have it. Most sites that AI assistants recommend do.
Think of it as the difference between a stranger describing your business from memory and handing them your business card. Without structured facts, a machine reads your site and guesses: is this a lender or a broker? Montreal or all of Quebec? With them, there's nothing to guess. And systems built to avoid saying wrong things — which is what AI assistants are — strongly prefer businesses they don't have to guess about.
In our site reviews, "structured facts present on N of your pages" is measured on every crawl, because it moves the grade that matters most: whether machines can state who you are without error. It's also one of the cheapest fixes in the whole field — no redesign, no new content, just facts written once in the right format on the right pages.
If your web person says "we did the SEO," ask one precise question: is our business described in structured data, and on which pages? The answer tells you a lot about the work.