Every word in your report, in plain language

A small block of code that states plainly, in a form a computer can parse, what your page is about. It is invisible to visitors.

Humans work out that you are a restaurant from the photographs and the menu. Machines do not infer — they read this block, or they guess. Everywhere the report says “schema” or “markup,” this is what it means. It is usually a `<script type="application/ld+json">` tag in your page’s header, and it is the single most useful thing most sites can add.

The structured data block that states your business exists: its name, its website, its logo, how to reach it.

Without it an engine has a website but not a business. It can see words on a page and still have no confident answer to “who is this?” — which is the question it has to answer before it can recommend you to anybody.

The same idea, pinned to a place: your address, your service area, and a latitude and longitude.

“Near me” answers and map results are built from businesses an engine can locate on a map. A business with no coordinates is a business it can describe but not place, which quietly removes you from every question that has a location in it.

Structured data that tells an engine “this is a question, and this is its answer.”

It is the format AI answers lift from most directly, because the work of deciding what answers what is already done. The report checks two things: whether it is there, and whether the answers underneath are substantial — three hollow questions with one-line answers score the same as nothing much.

Headings written the way a customer would ask, rather than as labels. “How much does a bathroom remodel cost?” instead of “Services.”

AI search is an answering machine. It is looking for content shaped like an answer, and a heading phrased as a question with a plain answer directly beneath it is the cleanest passage it can find. You already know your questions — they are what people ask on the phone before they book.

A specific, identifiable thing — this business, this person, this place — as distinct from a string of text that happens to match.

Getting recommended means being an entity an engine is confident about, not a page that contains the right words. Most of the AI-search half of the score is really measuring one thing: can an engine tell what entity this site is about?

A list, inside your structured data, of your other profiles — Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, the chamber directory, your Facebook page.

It is how you tell an engine “that listing over there is also me.” Each one it can confirm makes it more confident it has the right business, which is the difference between being described accurately and being confused with someone else.

Whether anything outside your own website agrees with what your website claims.

Engines cross-check. Good markup makes you eligible to be cited; corroboration is part of what decides whether you actually are. A Google Business Profile with real reviews, a consistent chamber listing, a mention in a local news piece — the same things that have always made a business look legitimate to a person.

The report flags this as a checklist rather than a finding, because it cannot be verified from a crawl of your site alone.

Anything that responds to a question with an answer instead of a list of links — including the AI summary now sitting above Google’s results.

The practical difference is the number of results. A page of blue links has ten places to be. An answer has two or three. That is the whole reason any of this matters more than it did five years ago.

The line that becomes the clickable headline in search results and the name of the browser tab.

The failure the report catches most often is a title that says “Home” or “Home Page” — one of the few pieces of text you fully control, spent on a word that describes every website ever made.

A one- or two-sentence summary of the page, written for the search result rather than the page itself.

Leave it out and Google writes its own, usually by scraping whatever text it finds first — which is frequently your navigation menu.

A written description of a photograph, for someone who cannot see it.

It is the accessibility floor first and a search signal second. It is also the only way an engine knows what is in your images. Describe the actual subject, place and condition — not “image1.jpg,” and not a list of keywords.

The small trail near the top of an interior page — Home / Services / Roofing — plus the structured data that states the same thing.

It tells an engine how your pages relate to each other, which is how it works out that a page is part of a real site rather than a page floating on its own.

A tag naming the one true address for a page, when the same content can be reached more than one way.

It stops a single page competing with copies of itself. It matters most after a rebuild or a move, when old and new addresses both still work.