Does Organization markup need to be on every page of a website?

No. Google recommends adding Organization markup to the homepage or to a single page that describes the company, such as the About page, and says it does not need to be on every page of the site.

Does a company need an LEI or a D-U-N-S Number for Organization markup?

No. Google lists no required properties for Organization markup and recommends adding the properties that apply to an organization; identifiers such as an LEI or a D-U-N-S Number only belong in it if the company has one. Many companies do have a VAT identification number, which can be stated in the vatID property.

Do AI systems such as ChatGPT read Organization markup directly?

Whether and how an AI system uses Organization markup when it writes an answer is up to its provider and is not publicly documented. In Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines, Microsoft says in general terms that structured data may support clearer grounding (a clearer basis for AI answers) but does not guarantee visibility, and Google states that AI Overviews and AI Mode require no special schema.org markup. Regardless, Organization markup is a clean, machine-readable source of company facts for any system that reads structured data.

Organization markup: company facts for machines

Organization markup records in a website’s code who is behind it: a company with this name, this address, this logo, and these official profiles. People find this information on the homepage, in the legal notice, or on the About page. Organization markup repeats it in a fixed form, so software doesn’t have to infer it from running text. It is an application of structured data: the vocabulary comes from schema.org, and it is usually embedded in the JSON-LD format.

What Organization markup contains

schema.org describes the type Organization as an organization such as a school, a nongovernmental organization, a corporation, or a club. A simplified example for the fictional company Example GmbH shows what Organization markup for a company can look like, with the name of each property before the colon:

@type: Organization or a more specific subtype
name: Example
legalName: Example GmbH, the registered legal name if it differs from the usual name
url: the address of the homepage
logo: the address of an image file with the logo
address: street, postal code, city, and country, each as a separate value
telephone and email: the general contact details, with the phone number including country and area code
vatID: the VAT identification number
sameAs: links to the company’s official profiles

In the source code, all of this information sits bundled in a separate JSON-LD block.

Instead of the general type Organization, Google recommends the most specific subtype that fits a company. For businesses with a store, a practice, or a branch, that is LocalBusiness: a subtype of both Organization and Place that also supports details such as opening hours. Below it are even more specific types, such as Dentist for a dental practice, Store for a retail shop, and Restaurant for a restaurant. LocalBusiness markup doesn’t replace entries in map services and directories; these business listings are maintained on each platform.

Once Organization markup is on the website, other structured data can refer to it. In JSON-LD, it can be given a fixed identifier (@id) for this purpose, which an article, for example, can reference to name the company as its publisher. How content is attributed to its authors and publishers is part of authorship.

Identifiers and sameAs

A name alone is often ambiguous: several companies have similar names, and one company appears under both a short and a full name. Identifiers and references in Organization markup help establish which entity is meant. Common identifiers include:

VAT identification number (vatID): Google calls it an important trust signal for users, who can look up a business in public VAT registries with it.
Legal Entity Identifier (LEI): a 20-character alphanumeric code under the ISO 17442 standard that uniquely identifies a legal entity, such as a company, worldwide. Its data is public and free to access.
D-U-N-S Number: a nine-digit identifier from the Data Universal Numbering System (D-U-N-S) that the business data company Dun & Bradstreet assigns to businesses.

schema.org has dedicated properties for the LEI and the D-U-N-S Number (leiCode, duns). Google, however, recommends stating both in the iso6523Code property, prefixed with a code for the identification scheme: 0199 for the LEI, 0060 for the D-U-N-S Number.

The sameAs property points to pages that unambiguously identify the same company. schema.org gives a Wikipedia article, a Wikidata entry, or the official website as examples; Google mentions profiles on social networks and review sites. What belongs there, then, are pages that represent the company itself, such as its own company profile on a professional network, not articles in which it merely appears.

Why Organization markup matters for GEO

Organization markup gathers the core company facts in one place, in a fixed form, and with identifiers that can be matched against other sources. Google says it uses some properties, such as identifiers, behind the scenes to distinguish an organization from others. That is a statement about Google’s own systems; AI providers have not publicly documented whether their systems use Organization markup in their answers. For GEO, Organization markup is an obvious first step into structured data: it is usually quick to set up and describes the company for any software that reads structured data.

Organization markup is only reliable if every value matches the visible company information. In Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines, which also apply to Copilot, Microsoft states that markup must accurately reflect visible content and that misleading markup may be ignored. On German business websites, many of these details already appear in the legal notice (Impressum) that section 5 of Germany’s Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz requires for commercial digital services that are usually offered for a fee. Among other things, it includes the name and address, the legal form for legal persons, contact details including an email address, the register and registration number where applicable, and the VAT identification number if the company has one. Keeping the same facts identical on profiles, in directories, and in press materials is part of brand fact consistency.

Organization markup

Definition

What Organization markup contains

Identifiers and sameAs

Why Organization markup matters for GEO

Frequently asked questions