Top-1M Sites Using Service Markup Grew Fivefold Since 2023, Yet Only 29.7% of Marked-Up Services Say What Type of Service They Are

Summary

Picture a bookkeeping firm that offers payroll, tax returns and monthly accounts for small businesses in two counties. Its website explains all three. When someone asks an AI assistant for "a bookkeeper near me who does payroll," the assistant has to infer the firm's services from page text unless the markup says so outright.

The schema.org Service type lets a business list each service it offers, with a type, description, provider and the area it serves. It is the service-business counterpart to product markup, and it maps directly to the "who does X near me" questions AI engines answer every day.

Use of Service markup has grown fast, from 847 top-1M sites in 2023 to 4,229 in 2026. Most of those services are still described thinly: only 29.7% say what type of service they are.

What we measured

We used four October crawls from HTTP Archive (2023 to 2026), mobile client, top-1M sites. HTTP Archive crawls each site's homepage plus one inner page. We parsed the rendered JSON-LD on each page, flattened nested objects and @graph arrays, and counted every node typed Service, wherever it sits in the markup.

For 2026 we recorded each Service node's properties, how many Service nodes each page carries, the site's rank bucket, and a rough field for each service based on keywords in its name. Many names are generic or in other languages, so most fall into an unclassified group.

Service markup has grown fivefold in three years

Growth was modest from 2023 to 2024, then the count nearly doubled by 2025 and more than doubled again by 2026.

Even after that growth, sites with Service markup on a crawled page are 0.55% of the top 1M.

Most services are a name and little else

Across every Service node in the 2026 crawl, a name is almost always present. The fields that explain what the service is, who provides it and where are not.

Only 15.8% of Service nodes carry an @id, which limits how easily other markup on the page can point to them.

What kinds of services get marked up

Fields come from keywords in each service's name and are approximate. A page can appear in more than one field.

Services with no name at all appear on 646 pages, which gives a machine nothing to match against a question.

What this means

If you run a service business, add a Service node for each main service you offer, ideally on that service's own page. Give each one a name, a serviceType, a two or three sentence description, a provider that references your business's @id, and an areaServed listing the towns or regions you cover. Use the same wording as the visible page. Markup that matches the page is a small but real part of SEO for AI search for a service business.

Few competitors have done this well, and AI assistants answer "who offers X near me" by matching services to businesses and places. A free AI visibility audit will show whether assistants already connect your business to the services you sell, and our AI search optimization services add the markup if they do not.

Limits

HTTP Archive crawls one homepage and one inner page per site, so service pages are often not sampled and adoption is understated.

Field grouping is keyword based and covers only a minority of service names; most are unclassified.

Some Service nodes may describe things that are not services in the everyday sense; we did not review them one by one.

The top-1M list changes between crawls, and we count JSON-LD only.

Frequently asked questions

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