Structured data for a small business: what to declare

Berger+Team · Oct 9, 2026

Your business already holds the details a machine is looking for. The problem is where they sit.

Registration number, VAT identifier, registered office, legal form: every company carries them, and almost always they sit at the foot of the page, in the legal notice, set like the bottom of a letterhead. For a human reader that is perfectly fine. To a machine it is a string of characters like any other.

Why these details in particular

An assistant asked to recommend a supplier is, at heart, running an identity check: does this business exist, is it the right one, do the details match what I find elsewhere?

A company whose registration identifier is declared in readable form makes that check easy. One that carries it only as text in a legal notice passes it by luck — if the system happens to parse the line correctly.

The difference shows up when names collide. Two businesses with similar names in two different districts: the one with declared identifiers is easier to tell apart, the other more likely to be confused. That has nothing to do with company size and everything to do with how easy it is to recognise.

What to declare, in order

Name and legal form, exactly as registered — not the short version from the advertising.
The registration or VAT identifier, declared as an identifier rather than buried in prose.
The registered office, with street, postcode, town and region kept separate — not as one line of text.
Contact routes that lead to a person: phone, email, form.
The area you serve, if you work beyond your own town. A business covering three valleys does not say so with its address.
Opening hours, including seasonal closures — in a tourism region the season is the rule, not the exception.

Some identifiers have no dedicated place in the shared vocabulary. They are declared as a generic identifier, or they stay in the visible text. Either is legitimate; inventing a property to fit them is not.

⚠ Which of these your business is required to publish is a matter of law and for your accountant to answer — this is only about making what already applies machine-readable.

Where it matters most: more than one language

A business in a border region often appears in two languages, sometimes three. The identifiers stay the same — a tax number is not translated.

The text around them changes, and with it the risk: if the German version carries the details and the Italian one does not, a machine sees two different businesses — one complete, one not. Each language version has its own address and is judged on its own. The identifiers therefore belong on all of them, identically.

How to check it in five minutes

Open your page and look for the registration identifier. Can you select it, or is it part of an image?
Is it only in the legal notice, or also as a declared value?
Do the other language versions carry the same identifiers?
If you move office tomorrow, how many places do you have to change?

If the answer to the last one is more than one, one of them will eventually lag behind.

What to take away

The details that identify you already exist — the state asks for them, not the marketing department. Putting them in a form a machine can read adds no work. It only moves what is already written to a place where it is understood.

What structured data is, is explained in Structured data; which facts come first, in which facts should a machine be able to read about your business.

Frequently asked questions.

How do I keep opening hours and contact details up to date everywhere?

The core principle: one source instead of many copies. If opening hours, address and phone number are maintained in one central place, and the website, structured data and machine-readable formats automatically serve the same state, nothing can drift apart. That is exactly what a website built as a single source of truth delivers: change it once, current everywhere.

Externally, the effort stays manageable: above all, keep your Google Business Profile and the most important directories up to date — with exactly the same details as on your website. For seasonal hours, a fixed routine helps, say at the start and end of the season. The background: contradictory details are the most common reason AI assistants tell people wrong things about a business.

Can I correct wrong AI-generated information about my business?

You can't directly correct a single AI answer — but you control the sources it's built from. AI systems rely mainly on your website and public directories such as your Google Business Profile or trade directories.

Concretely: enter the same phone number, address, and opening hours everywhere — maintained in one place that all channels draw from. If that source has current, unambiguous, machine-readable details, it can gradually crowd out outdated or wrong information; realistically it takes weeks to months for AI answers to catch up.

Can an AI confuse my business with another one?

Yes, and it happens more often than people assume. AI systems map a name onto an entity — a single unambiguous thing in their model of the world. If the name is shared, or the data about it contradicts itself, statements land on the wrong company: someone else’s opening hours, someone else’s services, someone else’s reviews.

We know this from our own experience. Our name is held by several organisations worldwide, among them an AI company of the same name. Searching for the short form, we rank only sixth; for the full name, first — a snapshot, not a fixed value.

There is no trick for this, only unambiguity: the same spelling of name, address and phone number everywhere, machine-readable company details on your own site, and cross-references between the profiles that genuinely belong to you. The clearer the signals, the harder the confusion. A single entry is not enough — it is the sum that counts.