CiteScore

Guide

GEO for local businesses

What Google requires on LocalBusiness markup: name and address, hours and geo when they are true, and why a business should not mark up its own reviews.

14 October 2026 · CiteScore Team · 9 min read

A local business page has the same fetch problem as any other page, plus a place. Google Search and Maps can show a knowledge panel or a list of businesses. Google’s LocalBusiness structured data is how a site states the name, the address, and the hours. It does not publish a rate for how often an AI answer cites that panel. CiteScore does not query Google, Maps, or an answer engine.

The engine controls are separate from the address block. Start with how to get cited by AI answer engines, then the AI Overviews page if the surface is Google Search. Markup that is not specific to a storefront is on schema markup for AI search.

Name and address are the required fields

Google says a LocalBusiness rich result needs name and address. Use the most specific subtype that fits — Bakery, Dentist, Restaurant — rather than a generic LocalBusiness when one exists. Each location is its own entity. A department can be nested, and Google’s example of the name format is the store name plus the department name.

Recommended fields, when they are true on the page, are geo to at least five decimal places, openingHoursSpecification, telephone with country code and area code, url of that location, and priceRange under 100 characters. Food businesses can add servesCuisine and a menu URL. The Restaurant carousel is limited to a small set of providers. A single bakery page does not opt into it by adding carousel markup.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Bakery",
  "name": "Example Bakery",
  "url": "https://example.com/locations/main-street",
  "telephone": "+1-555-010-0100",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "100 Main Street",
    "addressLocality": "Springfield",
    "addressRegion": "IL",
    "postalCode": "62701",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "geo": {
    "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
    "latitude": 39.78172,
    "longitude": -89.65015
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": {
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
    "opens": "07:00",
    "closes": "15:00"
  }
}

That block is an example, not a business. Google’s structured data policies say the markup has to describe content people can see on the page. If the HTML says one street and the JSON-LD says another, the markup is describing a different place.

Reviews of your own business

Google’s LocalBusiness document says review and aggregateRating are recommended only for sites that capture reviews about other businesses. A shop marking up its own stars is outside that recommendation. Leave both properties off the page you control, unless the page is a directory of other businesses and the reviews follow the review-snippet guidelines.

The profile is a second record

Structured data on the site is not Google Business Profile. The AI features guide lists keeping Business Profile — and Merchant Center, if you sell online — up to date among the same fundamentals as the rest of Search. The name, address, and phone on the site, in the JSON-LD, and on the profile should be the same words. Google does not publish that match as an AI citation score. It does say AI Overviews and AI Mode only link pages that are indexed and eligible for a snippet.

Crawler access still applies. A disallow on Googlebot keeps the location page out of Search. Google-Extended is a different decision, covered on how to get cited by Gemini and AI crawlers. The label for the work is on answer engine optimization.

Check the public files

The free check reads JSON-LD on the homepage. A location page at another path is not that check. Confirm the location URL itself is the one you care about.

Run the free check on the host. It reads the homepage, robots.txt for GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended, /llms.txt, a sitemap, and JSON-LD on the homepage. It does not log into an answer engine. One URL continues at checkout.

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