Scattered snippets versus a resolved organisation
Open the source of most Indian websites that claim to have schema and you'll find the same thing: a plugin-generated WebPage block, an Organization block on the homepage only, and an FAQPage block on forty pages that all point at nothing. Every one of them validates. None of them connect.
The machine reading that sees forty unrelated documents. It can't tell that the company named in the homepage Organization block is the same company selling the product two clicks away, or that the author byline on your blog belongs to a person with credentials worth weighting.
The fix is structural rather than cosmetic. Every entity gets a stable @id — a canonical URI it is referred to by from everywhere else. Your Product references the Organization as its brand by @id. Your Article references the Person as its author by @id. The Organization carries sameAs links to the LinkedIn page, the Crunchbase entry, the Wikidata item if one exists. One graph, resolvable from any entry point.
That's the difference between telling Google forty facts and telling it one coherent thing forty times.
The graph we build, and in what order
Four entity types do most of the work for an Indian business. We build them in this order because each one anchors the next.
- Organization, once, at a stable
@idon the homepage. Legal name, logo, address, contact points, andsameAspointing at every profile you genuinely control — LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, your Google Business Profile URL, your Crunchbase or Zauba entry. This is the anchor everything else hangs off. - Person, for founders and authors, at their own stable
@id.jobTitle,worksForreferencing the Organization,sameAsto their LinkedIn and any speaking or publication profiles. This is what makes an author byline mean something rather than being a name in a grey box. - Product or Service, referencing the Organization as
brandorprovider. For ecommerce this carriesoffers, price, currency, availability andaggregateRating— but only where those things are visibly on the page and honest. - WebSite, WebPage and BreadcrumbList, wiring the pages together and giving every page an
isPartOfrelationship back to the site. Breadcrumbs are unglamorous and they're one of the few markups that still visibly changes a mobile result in India.
Which schema types still earn something in India
This list moves. Google deprecates markup types more often than agencies update their proposals, so here's where things actually stand — and which ones we'll decline to bill you for.
- We won't mark up content that isn't visible on the page. It's a policy violation with a delayed fuse, and manual actions arrive months after the person who installed the plugin has left.
- We won't put
aggregateRatingon a page with no real reviews. It's the single most common structured-data manual action we're asked to clean up.
| Type | What it does today | Worth implementing? |
|---|---|---|
| Product / Offer / Review | Price, availability, star ratings and merchant listings in results and in Shopping surfaces | Yes — the highest-return markup for any ecommerce site |
| BreadcrumbList | Replaces the raw URL in the result with a readable path, especially on mobile | Yes — cheap, stable, visible |
| Organization / LocalBusiness | Feeds knowledge panels, logo display and business information | Yes — this is the anchor for everything else |
| Article / NewsArticle | Eligibility for Top Stories and richer article presentation; carries the author entity | Yes, for anything published with a byline |
| Video | Video thumbnails and key-moment links in results | Yes, if you publish video on your own pages |
| Event, Recipe, JobPosting, Course | Genuine dedicated result formats, but only if you're actually one of these | Yes, where the business genuinely fits |
| FAQPage | Rich results were restricted in 2023 to a narrow set of government and health sites | Rarely for the snippet — still useful as machine-readable Q&A |
| HowTo | Retired. Produces nothing in search results | No |
| Sitelinks SearchBox | Removed in late 2024 | No |
| Speakable | Limited availability, narrow use | No, for almost everyone |
How it ships, validated, and how you know it stayed shipped
Delivery is the part that separates a schema project from a schema document. Ours goes into your codebase or your CMS, not into a PDF appendix.
For a Next.js, React or custom stack we raise pull requests that add JSON-LD as template-level components, so the markup generates from your real data rather than being hand-pasted per page. Your team reviews and merges — we don't hold merge rights on your production branch, and you should be wary of any agency that asks for them. For WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or Framer we implement directly, usually through the theme or a header injection rather than a plugin, because plugins go stale and overwrite each other.
Then three checks, every time. The Schema Markup Validator for syntax and vocabulary correctness. Google's Rich Results Test for eligibility, which is a different question. And Search Console's Enhancements reports for what Google actually did with it once crawled — which is the only one that counts, and the one that takes two to four weeks to populate.
After launch it goes on the pre-deploy checklist. Schema breaks silently: a template refactor drops a field, a plugin update rewrites the block, a price format changes and every Product item on the site starts erroring. We monitor the Enhancements reports monthly and it's part of our technical SEO work from then on.
Schema and AI assistants — the honest version
This is where the industry is currently overselling, so let's be precise about what's known.
What's true: structured data makes an entity machine-readable and unambiguous. AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on Google's index and Google's entity understanding, and structured data is one of the inputs to that understanding. A resolved organisation with sameAs links pointing at corroborating profiles is easier for any system to describe correctly than a name in a <h1>.
What isn't confirmed: that adding schema causes an LLM to cite you. No major assistant publishes structured data as a ranking or citation input, and nobody selling "AI schema optimisation" has evidence they aren't showing you. If they had a controlled test, they'd publish it.
So we implement it because entity clarity is durable and cheap, not because we can promise a citation. If AI visibility is the actual goal, the bigger levers are corroborating mentions on sites machines already trust, and pages that answer the question directly — which is what our AEO and GEO work covers.
What's included, what isn't, and what it costs
Schema is a line inside our SEO retainer rather than a product with its own invoice. A schema-only engagement genuinely finishes — the graph gets built in three to five weeks and then it's maintenance, and an agency still billing you monthly for it in month six is inventing work.
| Area | Included | Not included |
|---|---|---|
| Design | Entity graph across Organization, Person, Product/Service, Article, LocalBusiness, Breadcrumb — with @id references and sameAs | Marking up entities you can't evidence. If the Person has no public footprint, sameAs points nowhere and adds nothing. |
| Build | JSON-LD written as template components, delivered as pull requests, or implemented directly in WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Framer | Rebuilding your templates or migrating your CMS. We add markup to what exists. |
| Data | Mapping markup fields to your real product feed, CMS fields and business data so it generates rather than being pasted | Cleaning your product catalogue. If prices and stock are wrong in the source, correct markup publishes wrong facts faster. |
| Validation | Schema Markup Validator, Rich Results Test, and Search Console Enhancements monitoring monthly | Guaranteed rich result display. Google decides what it shows, and it declines eligible pages routinely. |
| Maintenance | Pre-deploy regression checks, error triage when Enhancements reports flag something, updates when Google deprecates a type | Perpetual monthly billing for a finished graph. When the work is done we say so in the report. |
| Pricing | Included in the SEO retainer — from ₹75,000/mo, or ₹40,000/mo for smaller sites, ex-GST. See pricing. | A published one-off price. Scope runs from a single Organization block to a 400-SKU product graph; we quote after the audit rather than name a number we'd have to walk back. |
What the 90-day guarantee measures here
Same guarantee as every engagement: on day one we freeze your trailing-90-day count of qualified leads from organic search, in writing, before anyone touches the site. Miss it in 90 days and we keep working free until we beat it. We never promise a specific ranking position for a specific keyword — nobody controls Google's index, and an agency guaranteeing position one is either buying links or counting on you not to check.
For schema work specifically we freeze a second set of numbers, because they move first and they're the honest early read: valid items and error counts per Enhancements report, the share of priority URLs with rich result eligibility, and rich result impressions in the Search Console performance report. Those should shift within two to four weeks of the markup being crawled.
If eligibility rises and clicks don't, the markup worked and the page didn't. That's a content problem, and we'd rather name it in week six than keep pointing at a green validation screen in month five.