Guide
Structured data, explained plainly.
It is a set of labels that tell a machine what your page says. Increasingly the machine reading it is not a search engine.
In short
A restaurant should mark up Restaurant or LocalBusiness with address, phone, opening hours and price range, plus Menu for the menu, FAQPage for question pages, and BreadcrumbList for navigation. It will not outrank a wrong Google category, but it makes your details machine-readable, which matters more each year as AI assistants answer questions by quoting sources.
Updated 28 August 2026
What structured data actually is
It is a block of labelled data in the page that says, in a format machines agree on, this is the address, these are the hours, this is a menu item and its price. Humans never see it. Search engines use it to understand the page rather than guess, and assistants increasingly use it to answer questions directly.
The types worth adding
There are dozens of schema types and a restaurant needs a handful. Adding more than you need does not help and creates maintenance.
- Restaurant or LocalBusiness: name, address, phone, hours, price range, cuisine
- Menu and MenuItem: the menu, with prices
- FAQPage: on pages that genuinely answer questions
- BreadcrumbList: so the path shows in results
- Review or AggregateRating: only for reviews you genuinely hold
Why it matters more now than it did
When somebody asks an assistant which restaurants near them do gluten-free, the assistant needs sources it can parse confidently. Pages with clean structured data are easier to quote accurately than pages where the hours are baked into an image. This is a low-effort way to be citable, and being citable is becoming its own distribution channel.
Get the hours right, because they get quoted
Of all the fields, opening hours cause the most real-world damage when wrong, because they are surfaced directly and people act on them. Mark up your actual hours, keep special hours current for holidays, and make sure the markup agrees with your Google profile and the visible text on the page. Three different answers is worse than none.
What not to do
Do not mark up reviews you invented or aggregate ratings you do not hold, which is a policy violation and can cost you rich results entirely. Do not mark up content that is not visible on the page. And do not treat schema as a ranking tactic: it clarifies, it does not persuade.
Questions, answered straight.
Not covered here? Just ask us.
Do I need a developer?
Usually a small amount of help, unless your site builder has a structured data setting. It is a one-off job rather than ongoing work.
Will it improve my ranking?
Not directly in most cases. It improves how your result is displayed and how confidently machines can quote you, both of which affect clicks.
Can I mark up my menu prices?
Yes, and it is worth doing. Just keep it current, because stale prices in markup are worse than absent ones.
How do I check it works?
Use a structured data testing tool to validate the syntax, then check the live result in search over the following weeks. Validation proves it parses, not that it will be used.
See it run your restaurant.
Twenty minutes on your menu and your numbers. We'll show you what actually changes in the first month and exactly what it costs. If it's not right for your restaurant, we'll tell you that instead.
- Live in days, not months
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