After Google's March update, Organization schema is the move Irish SMEs should make
The March 2026 core update finished rolling out on 8 April, twelve days after Google Search Central announced it. The post-mortem chatter has focused on ranking shuffles, but for small businesses watching AI search slowly siphon their referral traffic, the more important story is which markup is still earning visibility once the dust settles.
The short answer: not the markup most agencies sold you in 2022.
What the pruning has left behind
Google's structured-data documentation has been getting smaller, not larger, for three years. How-To rich results were deprecated entirely in August 2023, and FAQ rich results were restricted to "well-known, authoritative government and health websites" in the same announcement. Late in 2025 Google cut another round of low-traffic markup features. John Mueller stepped in on Reddit shortly after to clarify that "markup types come and go" but the underlying structured data is still core to how search systems read the web.
What survived all of that pruning is the part of schema.org that describes who you are and what you sell — Organization, LocalBusiness, Person, Product, Article, Review. These are also the types that AI Mode, Google's AI Overviews, and ChatGPT browsing lean on most when picking which sources to cite.
Why Organization schema specifically
When an AI assistant answers "who's a good plumber in Galway?", it has to resolve a name to a verifiable entity before it cites anyone. If your site provides clean Organization JSON-LD with a name, address, phone number, and — critically — a list of sameAs URLs pointing to authoritative external profiles, the assistant can confirm you exist, match you to its knowledge graph, and cite you with confidence. Without that, you're a string of characters on a page that may or may not be the same business mentioned three paragraphs down.
Both Google and Microsoft have publicly confirmed they use schema markup as input to their generative AI features, and OpenAI has acknowledged structured data influences which sources surface in ChatGPT search. None of those systems can cite a business they can't disambiguate.
Rich snippets were the prize of the blue-link era. Entity recognition is the prize of the AI era — and the markup is largely the same JSON-LD, just doing a different job.
What an Irish SME should ship this week
If you do nothing else after this update, get the following onto your homepage and your contact page:
- An
Organizationblock — orLocalBusinessif you have a single trading address — with name, full address, telephone, and email. - A
sameAsarray linking to your LinkedIn company page, Google Business Profile URL, primary social accounts, and your Wikidata entry if one exists. - A
knowsAboutarray of three to six specific topic strings — what you actually do, in plain language ("commercial roofing repair", "Irish payroll compliance"). This helps AI systems describe your domain without inventing it. - A
founderoremployeereference to aPersonentity for the named individual that customers actually search for. One-person consultancies in particular are leaving citations on the table by skipping this.
If you don't already have a Wikidata entry, that is the highest-leverage half-day project an Irish SME can take on this quarter. Wikidata feeds Google's Knowledge Graph directly, and a single confirmed entry stabilises every downstream AI citation that references your business.
What to stop doing
Don't bolt FAQ schema onto pages where the Q&A is supplementary. Google's general structured data guidelines require markup to describe the primary content of the page. Pages padded with off-topic FAQ blocks are the exact target of the 2023 restrictions, and there is no quiet reversal coming.
Don't stress about How-To. It's gone for rich results, and re-adding it does nothing good.
Don't let an SEO supplier sell you "schema as a service" at scale before they have shipped a clean Organization block on your homepage. That one block is doing more work today than it ever did, and the rest is detail.
The shift in one line
Schema used to earn you a star rating in the SERP. Now it earns you a citation in the answer. The markup looks similar — the audience changed.