What schema.org is
Schema.org is a collaborative vocabulary (originally launched by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo) for marking up web pages with structured, machine-readable facts. A page with schema tells crawlers "this is a LocalBusiness called X, with these hours, this address, these services, and this rating".
The schemas that matter for local businesses
LocalBusiness (name, address, hours, services, rating), Service (what you sell, who you serve), Review and AggregateRating (consumer trust signal), FAQPage (extracted into AI Overview and ChatGPT answers), HowTo (procedural content), Article (blog posts), BreadcrumbList (navigation hierarchy).
Why AI engines love schema
AI crawlers prefer structured data because it eliminates ambiguity. Reading "Northline Dental serves zip 75201" from JSON-LD takes zero inference. Pulling the same fact from prose takes more compute and risks error. AI engines prioritize sources they can parse confidently.
What good schema looks like
Every important page has at minimum: Organization or LocalBusiness. Service pages add Service and Offer. FAQ sections add FAQPage. Blog posts add Article + FAQPage. All of it validates against Google's Rich Results Test and the schema.org validator.
Common schema mistakes
Mismatched facts between schema and visible page content (Google penalizes this). Thin schema that just lists the name and nothing else. Missing sameAs links to social profiles. Not updating schema when the business changes.