Only 2.5% of Homepages With Organization Markup Use knowsAbout to Tell Machines What the Business Knows

Summary

Ask an AI assistant for "a roofer in Franklin who handles insurance claims" and it has to work out which businesses do that work, in that place. A roofing company's homepage markup could say exactly that, with areaServed for the towns it covers and knowsAbout for its specialties. Most do not.

Schema.org gives organizations a handful of properties that describe expertise and scope rather than identity. knowsAbout lists subjects the organization knows. areaServed names the places it serves. hasOfferCatalog lists the services or products it offers. These map closely to the questions people ask AI engines.

Across 233,602 top-1M homepages with Organization markup, only 2.5% use knowsAbout and 6.6% use any of the three.

What we measured

We parsed the rendered JSON-LD on every top-1M homepage in the October 2026 HTTP Archive mobile crawl, walking nested objects and @graph arrays. We kept homepages with at least one Organization-type node (Organization, Corporation, LocalBusiness and subtypes, OnlineStore and similar) and recorded which properties those nodes carry.

This is a property-level count. A homepage counts as using a property if any Organization-type node on it includes that property, whatever its value. Business type groups come from the Organization-type names the page declares (news media, education, online store, LocalBusiness subtypes, or plain Organization and Corporation, checked in that order).

Expertise and service properties are rare

We counted nine properties that describe what a business does, knows or has earned.

areaServed is the most used of the group and still appears on about one homepage in twenty.

Local businesses and schools use them more often

Businesses that choose a specific type also tend to fill in more detail.

Generic Organization or Corporation markup, which makes up 78.5% of the sample, uses these properties least.

Rank makes little difference

Unlike most markup features, expertise properties are no more common on the biggest sites.

That leaves the field open for smaller businesses to describe themselves more fully than larger competitors do.

What this means

Add areaServed with the cities, counties or regions you actually serve, knowsAbout with the specific topics and services you are expert in, and a hasOfferCatalog listing your main services. Keep the wording consistent with your service pages so the markup and the visible content agree. These three properties are some of the cheapest SEO for AI search you can do on a homepage.

These properties answer the same who, what and where questions people type into AI assistants. If you want to know whether assistants already connect your business to the right services and places, start with a free AI visibility audit.

Limits

Homepages only; service pages may carry these properties instead.

We count presence, not quality. An areaServed value of a whole country counts the same as a precise city list.

Search engines do not document how much weight these properties carry, and we make no claim about ranking effects.

Business type comes from declared schema types, which some sites set loosely.

Frequently asked questions

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