Schema for Voice Search: What to Mark Up and What It Can't Do

Picture a dental office in Alamo Heights. Its website says, in friendly type, that the office opens at eight on weekdays and stays late on Thursdays. A person reads that and understands. A machine reads it and has to guess which number is an hour, which word is a day and whether "late" means six or nine.

Schema markup removes the guessing. It is a small block of code, usually JSON-LD, that labels each fact on the page: this is the business name, this is the phone number, these are the hours, these are the coordinates of the front door. Search engines and the systems behind assistants read those labels to build and check what they know about you.

Here is the part the sales decks skip. When someone says "call a dentist near me," the assistant does not crawl your website to decide. It reads a listing: Google Business Profile for Google Assistant and Gemini, Apple Maps for Siri, licensed listing data for Alexa. The voice search guide maps which assistant reads what. Your schema is a corroborating witness. When it agrees with the listing, it adds confidence. When it disagrees, it adds doubt, and doubt is how a voice answer ends up naming the office down the street.

Schema.org has a general type called LocalBusiness and a long family tree of more specific types beneath it. Use the most specific one that is true. A specific type tells a machine what you do in a single word, and it opens up properties that only make sense for that kind of business, such as a menu and a reservations flag for a restaurant.

If nothing fits exactly, use LocalBusiness and let your description and your listing category carry the detail. Do not invent a type. Validators will flag it, and every parser downstream will quietly ignore it.

Below is what the markup for a fictional San Antonio plumber holds, property by property. On the page it lives as one JSON-LD script; your developer or your site platform writes the code. Your job is simpler and more important: make sure every value in the middle column is true, current and identical to your listings.

Hours are the field a voice assistant uses most and an owner checks least. "Open now" and "open on Sunday" are filters, and a business that fails the filter is not considered, however good its reviews.

Regular hours

Use openingHoursSpecification rather than the older openingHours shorthand where you can. Each entry names the days, an opening time and a closing time in 24-hour format. If you close for lunch, that's two entries for the same day. For a business open around the clock, Google's documentation shows opening at 00:00 and closing at 23:59.

Special hours

Holidays, inventory days, the week you close for a family wedding. Add a dated entry with validFrom and validThrough set to that date. To say closed all day, Google's documentation sets both the opening and closing time to 00:00. Then change the same date on your Google, Apple, Bing and Yelp listings, because those are what the assistants read first. If Siri keeps announcing the old hours anyway, the fix for Siri's wrong business hours walks through the Apple side.

FAQPage markup labels question-and-answer pairs. In 2023 Google cut its FAQ rich result, the expandable questions under a search listing, back to a narrow group of well-known government and health sites. Most small businesses lost the visual reward overnight, and a small industry of FAQ plugins lost its sales pitch.

The label is still worth having on a page that genuinely answers questions. It tells any machine reading the page where each question begins and which sentences answer it. That is the exact shape a voice reply takes: a question someone would ask aloud and an answer short enough to say in one breath. A taco shop's page about whether it caters and how much notice it needs is the right kind of content. A page of keyword questions nobody asks, written to fish for traffic, is the wrong kind, markup or no markup.

HowTo markup labels a sequence of steps, and Google has stopped showing HowTo rich results too. Use it only where the page really is a procedure a customer follows: how to shut off the water main before the plumber arrives, how to get ready for a first cleaning. Wrapping a sales page in HowTo markup and hoping is a strategy in the same sense that a lottery ticket is a retirement plan.

speakable is a schema.org property that points at the parts of a page best suited to being read aloud, using CSS selectors or XPath. It sounds like it was built for voice search, and in a sense it was. In practice, Google's documentation has described it for years as a beta feature for news publishers, in US English, for Google Assistant. A plumber, a dentist or a taco shop is not the intended user, and adding it shouldn't be expected to change what any assistant says about you.

It doesn't hurt. If you publish timely articles and your developer is already writing schema, it costs a few lines. Keep it in proportion. What makes a passage speakable is the passage: a question as the heading, an answer of about thirty words, plain nouns, no throat-clearing. Get that right and every assistant can use it, labeled or not. The earlier voice search guide explains the one-breath test.

Schema may be the most oversold line item in local marketing. It is useful, cheap to do properly and easy to describe as magic. Here is what it does not do, however cleanly it validates.

If you suspect your markup and your listings have drifted apart, the free Voice Search Visibility Check puts your Google, Apple Maps, Yelp and website details side by side, so you can see the disagreement before an assistant settles it for you.

If you'd rather hand it off, voice and ambient assistant optimization covers the markup, the listings it has to match and a monthly out-loud test. Schema is also ordinary SEO work, so if you already pay someone for that, ask them for the validator results. Restaurants have a few extra properties worth using, covered in voice search for restaurants.