Schema markup

Schema markup (also called structured data) is a shared vocabulary, defined at schema.org, that you embed in your website's code to spell out what each piece of information means. Instead of leaving a search engine to guess that "5 to 10" on your page refers to your Friday hours, schema explicitly tags it as opening hours. For a restaurant there is a dedicated set of types covering your name, address, phone (your NAP, see NAP consistency), cuisine, price range, menu, accepted reservations, and aggregate star rating.

This is plumbing, not marketing copy, but it is what lets your information travel accurately into the surfaces where guests actually decide. It powers the rich results Google shows (star ratings, hours, and menu snippets right in search), and it gives AI systems clean, machine-readable facts to pull from. Since 62% of consumers find restaurants through Google, and AI assistants increasingly compose the answer, the quality of your structured data directly shapes whether those systems represent you correctly or not at all.

You do not hand-write schema as an operator: a well-built restaurant website generates it, and a modern website builder can produce and maintain it automatically as your hours and menu change. It is a core building block of both Local SEO and Generative engine optimization (GEO): the cleaner the labels, the more reliably you show up in AI Overviews and AI recommendations.