Low impact · weight 3 · worth up to 0.6 points of the total score
Local search trusts a business whose name, address and phone agree everywhere they appear. A telephone in the markup that differs from the number the page asks people to call is a contradiction Google has to resolve, and it may resolve it against you.
Use one phone number: the same in the LocalBusiness markup, in the page's tel: links and in your Google Business Profile.
Check a page for this, and the other 70 checks at once
Site has a reachable XML sitemap
A sitemap is the list of pages a site wants crawled. Without one Google finds pages only by following links, so new or thinly linked pages can take weeks to be discovered.
Search and AI answers may quote the page
nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet tell Google how much of the page it may show. They also govern Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode: a page that forbids snippets is not quoted there either, and a very short max-snippet leaves it little to quote.
Missing pages answer 404
When an address that does not exist answers 200, search engines index error pages as real ones, and a broken link on another site looks like it works. Sending every missing page to the homepage is treated the same way: Google calls it a soft 404. We ask the site for a page that cannot exist and look at the answer.
Page describes itself with structured data
schema.org markup tells search engines what the page is: an article, a product with a price, a business with an address. Without it Google infers that from the text, and rich results such as stars, prices and FAQs are not available at all. It is often sold as a way into AI answers; measured, it is not: a 2025 Ahrefs study of 1,885 pages found no effect on AI citations, and AI assistants fetching a page live do not read JSON-LD. Add it for Google's rich results.
