Landfall study · October 2026

Most UK business websites have structured data. Most of it says almost nothing.

We read the schema.org markup on 115 independent trades, hair and beauty, and dental websites. Three in four have some. Very little of it tells a search engine, or an AI agent, what the business is or how to reach it.

Sample: 150 independent businesses drawn at random from OpenStreetMap (chains excluded) in ten UK cities; 115 homepages could be read. Method and limits at the end.

75%have some structured data

20%say they are a local business

53%of business descriptions omit the phone number

Present, but generic

The most common types are WebSite (57% of sites), Organization (43%), WebPage and SearchAction (38% each). That is the pattern website builders and SEO plugins add by default: it describes the website, not the business behind it.

Any structured data at all

75%

Describes the business (Organization or LocalBusiness)

61%

Uses a LocalBusiness type (Plumber, Dentist, HairSalon...)

20%

Rating markup (AggregateRating)

11%

The details that matter are missing

Of the 70 sites whose markup describes the business, 53% leave out the phone number. Of the 23 that use a LocalBusiness type, 35% leave out opening hours. These are exactly the facts a customer, a map listing or an AI assistant looks for first.

Errors are less common than gaps

At least one error (missing required property, bad date or rating, unparseable JSON-LD)

17%

JSON-LD that does not parse at all

Broken markup is not the main problem. The main problem is markup that is valid but empty of useful facts.

Sharing basics

Canonical link

80%

Open Graph title

75%

Open Graph image

50%

Half the sites have no Open Graph image, so a link to them shared on social media or in a chat shows no preview picture.

By sector

The three sectors are close: 79% of dental sites, 74% of trades and 71% of hair and beauty sites have some structured data, and around 60% of each describe the business. No sector does the job well.

Why it matters now

Structured data used to be mostly about search result snippets. AI assistants and agents now read it too, to answer "find me a plumber open on Saturday" or to fill in a contact record. A site whose markup only says "this is a website" gives them nothing to work with, and they fall back on guessing from page text.

Method and limits

Businesses: random sample of independent businesses (no brand tag) with a website listed in OpenStreetMap, in ten UK city areas, 50 per sector. OpenStreetMap data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
Read: 115 of 150 homepages. The rest were dead domains, error pages, broken HTTPS, timeouts or empty JavaScript pages.
Each homepage was fetched once in October 2026 and its HTML analysed without running JavaScript. Markup injected by scripts or tag managers is not counted.
Homepages only; inner pages may carry more markup. Individual businesses are not named.
Required and recommended properties follow the core of Google's structured data guidelines for each type. This is a practical check, not a full schema.org validation.

Run the same check

Every number here comes from Landfall's structured data check, a pay-per-call tool for AI agents and the developers who build them. It lists every schema.org item on a page, flags errors and missing properties, and returns the fixes as JSON.

GET /v1/schema?url=… · $0.01 per call via x402 · MCP tool check_structured_data

Landfall · Developer guide · Study 1: ad readiness