Structured data used to be an optional refinement that earned a star rating in the results page. That is no longer what it is for.
AI assistants answering "who does emergency plumbing near me" rely heavily on machine-readable signals. A business with no LocalBusiness schema, no tappable contact links and a broken heading hierarchy is difficult for those systems to describe, so they describe a competitor instead.
This is a genuinely new gap, and most small business websites still have it — which makes it one of the clearest openings an agency can lead with today.
Every point below comes from signals collected during the scan.
Detect whether structured data exists at all, and whether the type matches what the business actually is.
A 0–100 read combining tel: and mailto: links, schema, H1 hierarchy and Open Graph or canonical metadata, rated Good, Needs work or Poor.
Open Graph, Twitter card and canonical tags — the tags that decide how a link appears when anyone shares it.
Pages with no H1, or seven competing H1s, reported with the actual observed count rather than a vague warning.
Run a trade or vertical list through the queue.
Narrow to the businesses with no structured data or a mismatched type.
The audit report covers this in plain language before it covers the markup itself.
Find the local businesses whose websites are invisible to search and to AI assistants.
Stop pitching "we can improve your rankings". Start with the exact technical gap on their page.
A defensible answer, built from the site's measurable condition rather than personal taste.
