A structured data checklist for citability.
Nine checks, each verifiable before launch, and the two that fail most often.
The checklist
Work top to bottom. Each item is checkable on a live URL.
The one that fails most
Consistency. Schema asserting an address, service area, phone format, or business name that differs from the visible page, or from the Business Profile, undermines the attribution it was meant to establish. This is the single most common defect in otherwise complete implementations, and it is entirely clerical.
The second most common failure
Duplicate organisation blocks. A plugin adds its own alongside hand-written schema, the two disagree about the phone number or the hours, and nothing on the page looks different. Check the rendered source rather than a plugin preview, and check it again after any theme or plugin update.
Author and date fields are not decoration
Article schema with a named author who has a real role, and dates that reflect when the page was actually written and last revised, does attribution work that an anonymous blog cannot. Backdating or bulk-updating modified dates to look fresh is the wrong end of this trade, and it is detectable.
What to leave out
Four things people add that do nothing or actively hurt.
How to validate properly
Run each template through a structured data validator and fix every error rather than only the warnings you recognise. Read the JSON-LD in the rendered source on a live URL. Check Search Console's enhancement reports a fortnight later, since some issues only appear at scale. Keep a one-page note of which types sit on which template and when each was last checked.
What this buys and what it does not
It removes guesswork about who is answering, what they do, and where. It is not a ranking lever on its own and it will not rescue a page that answers nothing. Treat it as attribution infrastructure. On a rebuild here it is specified per template in the blueprint, written by hand, and re-checked in the post-launch crawl.
Where each block goes
Placement is part of the specification.
Do it by hand or with a plugin
By hand, on a build you control. Plugins are defensible on a site nobody is maintaining, because some schema beats none, but they duplicate blocks, assert defaults you did not choose, and break on update. If you use one, disable its organisation block if you have written your own, and check the rendered source afterwards.
The order to work in
Organisation block first, since everything else attaches to it. Then breadcrumbs, which are mechanical. Then Service and AreaServed, which need the page content settled. Then FAQPage and Article last, because those depend on copy that is still being written. Validating as you go is faster than validating everything at the end.
Related guides.
Two acronyms for the same shift: being the source an answer engine quotes rather than a link it lists.
The retrieval and attribution mechanism, described without invented statistics.
How AI answer engines retrieve and cite sources, and what actually makes a roofing site citable.
Find out if your site is citable.
$2,500, and you see every answer a competitor is cited for and you are not.