If people are looking for a groomer near them and your website doesn’t say that you’re a groomer, then they’re gonna be passed off to the next one who says they are a groomer.
It makes a big difference, because this is what the search engines and AI are looking for.
Drupal is good for search engines and AI because it structures the content properly, for the engines to read it properly and read it easily.
Part of that structure is the @type. It says what the page is, for example, a groomer, a vet, a restaurant, an event.
If it’s the wrong type, it gets pulled up for the wrong information, for the wrong category. If there’s no type, it won’t be categorized right.
We built a services directory, and my worry was that everybody was gonna type something differently. There wasn’t gonna be any kind of uniformity.
So I built a module for it. It lets you choose the word that you need to use, the category. It carries that throughout each page you make of that type, so you don’t have to keep putting it in. And you don’t have to dig through all the long list of choices.
Who should care? Anyone who is worried about having their business found and cited by AI.
It’s a part of the puzzle, but it’s not the whole puzzle. But it is an important part, and it’s in the foundation of the website. Structured data helps, but it’s not a guarantee.
Check your own site
Go to validator.schema.org.
Put your website URL in.
Hit Run Test.
Look at your results.
Look for the @type.
If it’s wrong, or you don’t see one, call your web person to fix it, or fix it yourself :)