# Structured data for a small business: what to declare

Topic: [Machine-readable website](https://btlabs.dev/en/ai-website)

> Which company details belong in machine-readable form and in what order — from the registration number to the area you serve, with a five-minute check.

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

1. **Name and legal form**, exactly as registered — not the short version from the advertising.
2. **The registration or VAT identifier**, declared as an identifier rather than buried in prose.
3. **The registered office**, with street, postcode, town and region kept separate — not as one line of text.
4. **Contact routes** that lead to a person: phone, email, form.
5. **The area you serve**, if you work beyond your own town. A business covering three valleys does not say so with its address.
6. **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](https://schema.org/Organization). 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](https://btlabs.dev/en/glossary/structured-data); which facts come first, in [which facts should a machine be able to read about your business](https://btlabs.dev/en/posts/what-structured-data-to-add).

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Source: https://btlabs.dev/en/posts/structured-data-for-small-business
Last-Modified: 2026-10-09T07:00:01.387Z
Languages: [de](https://btlabs.dev/llms/de/posts/strukturierte-daten-betrieb) · [it](https://btlabs.dev/llms/it/posts/dati-strutturati-azienda)
See also: [llms.txt](https://btlabs.dev/llms.txt) · [ai.txt (Policy)](https://btlabs.dev/ai.txt) · [identity.json](https://btlabs.dev/identity.json)