Organization schema and entity markup

01What is organization schema?

Organization schema is structured data that describes the organization behind a website using the schema.org Organization type. The schema.org definition is broad on purpose: an organization such as a school, NGO, corporation or club. For a publisher, a shop or a handbook like this one, it is the machine-readable answer to "who runs this site?"

Google's Organization structured data documentation describes two jobs for the markup. Some properties help Google disambiguate your organization from others with similar names. Others can influence what appears in results, such as the logo shown in search results and in a knowledge panel. There are no required properties; Google recommends adding the ones that are relevant.

This guide, in the AI answers section, treats Organization markup as entity markup: a way to make one organization unmistakable to any system that reads the page.

02What are entities, in plain English?

An entity is a distinct thing that can be identified: a person, a company, a place, a product. Search engines and AI systems keep track of entities and the facts attached to them, so that "Example Garden Handbook" the publisher is not confused with a book of the same name or a shop in another country.

Entity markup is any structured data that names an entity and gives it identifying details. Organization does this for the publisher; Person does it for authors, as the guide to Author and Person schema explains. Google's introduction to structured data says it uses the structured data it finds to gather information about the web and the world, including the people, books and companies in the markup, and that it can make general use of the sameAs property beyond the documented rich results.

Other answer engines do not document how they use entity markup. What they do document is how they fetch pages, which is covered in the guide to how ChatGPT and Perplexity read your pages. Clear entity markup in raw HTML costs little and removes ambiguity for anything that reads it.

03Organization or LocalBusiness: which one fits?

Use Organization for the entity that runs the site when it has no single public premises customers visit: a publisher, an online shop, a software company, a handbook. Use LocalBusiness, a more specific type, for a business with a physical location, opening hours and customers who come to it. The guide to local business schema covers that case, including subtypes such as Dentist or Bakery.

A LocalBusiness is also an Organization in schema.org, so everything below about @id, logo and sameAs applies to both.

04How does @id connect the site graph?

An @id is an identifier for a node in your JSON-LD, usually a URL with a fragment such as https://example.com/#organization. It is not a page anyone visits. It is a stable name for the organization that other nodes can point to.

Describe the Organization in full once, normally on the home page. Every other page then refers to it: the WebSite node's publisher, each Article's publisher, and an author's worksFor all carry {"@id": "https://example.com/#organization"}. The result is a connected graph in which every page agrees on who the publisher is.

Keep the @id identical everywhere, including the trailing slash and the fragment. A plugin that prints /#organization on one template and /#org on another has created two organizations as far as a machine can tell.

05Which sameAs links actually help?

sameAs lists URLs of pages that identify the same entity elsewhere. The schema.org sameAs definition is precise about what qualifies.

The test is whether a stranger following the link would be certain it is the same organization. Good candidates:

• The organization's official profiles on major platforms, where the profile links back to the site.
• A public company register or industry directory entry for the exact legal entity.
• An encyclopedia or knowledge base entry about the organization, if one genuinely exists.

Poor candidates are pages that only mention the organization, profiles abandoned years ago, review listings for a different branch and links bought or created only to be listed. A short list of strong links beats a long list of weak ones.

Revisit the list once a year. Profiles get renamed, companies change registers, and a sameAs link that now returns an error or redirects to a different account weakens the identification it was meant to strengthen. Remove dead links rather than leaving them for a crawler to find.

06Logos and contact points

Google reads the logo property to understand which logo you want shown, for example in search results and knowledge panels. Its logo guidelines ask for an image of at least 112 by 112 pixels, at a crawlable and indexable URL, that looks right on a white background.

Contact details go in properties such as email, telephone, address and contactPoint. Add only details that are published on the site and monitored. A merchant can also describe return policies and similar details that, according to the same Google page, can feed a merchant knowledge panel.

Use the same logo file in the markup as in the site header where you can, and keep a square version for the markup if the header logo is a wide wordmark. A logo that changes on every redesign gives Google one more inconsistency to resolve.

07Organization markup in WordPress

Most WordPress SEO plugins ask, in their settings, whether the site represents an organization or a person, and then print the matching node on every page with a name, logo and social profiles taken from those settings. That is usually the cleanest source of Organization markup, because it is described once and referenced everywhere.

Problems start when a second source adds its own block. A theme with built-in schema, a page builder, a review plugin and a hand-written snippet in the header can each print an Organization, with slightly different names or logos. To a machine, that is several publishers claiming one site.

A five-minute entity check

1. Open the home page source and search for "Organization". Count the nodes; one is the target.
2. Copy the @id and search an article's source for it. The article's publisher should use the same value.
3. Open the logo URL in a browser and confirm it loads and is at least 112 by 112 pixels.
4. Open every sameAs link and confirm each one is about this organization and still live.
5. Compare the name, email and address in the markup with the About and Contact pages.

Google's Organization documentation also lists formal identifiers, such as ISO 6523 codes and NAICS industry codes, that are used behind the scenes to tell organizations apart. Add them only if your organization actually has them; a registered company can, a hobby site usually cannot, and both are fine.

08JSON-LD example

The example below is a home page graph: the Organization with an @id, and a WebSite node that names it as publisher. Values are examples. If you want the wider picture first, start here with the handbook's overview of structured data.

1{2  "@context": "https://schema.org",3  "@graph": [4    {5      "@type": "Organization",6      "@id": "https://example.com/#organization",17      "name": "Example Garden Handbook",8      "url": "https://example.com/",9      "logo": {10        "@type": "ImageObject",11        "url": "https://example.com/images/logo-512.png",12        "width": 512,213        "height": 51214      },15      "email": "editors@example.com",16      "sameAs": [317        "https://example.org/profile/example-garden-handbook",18        "https://example.net/companies/example-garden-handbook"19      ]20    },21    {22      "@type": "WebSite",23      "@id": "https://example.com/#website",24      "url": "https://example.com/",25      "name": "Example Garden Handbook",26      "publisher": {427        "@id": "https://example.com/#organization"28      }29    }30  ]31}