The five fields that decide whether AI can find you

The five

1. Name — exactly as it appears on your Google Business Profile, your invoices and your ute. Not the trading name on one and the registered entity on another.
2. Address — street, suburb, state, postcode. If you work from home and do not publish a street address, use the suburb and say plainly that you serve a region.
3. Phone — in international form for the markup (+61 3 6257 1300), which every phone dials, and in local form on the page where people read it.
4. Opening hours — even "Mon–Fri 7am–4pm, closed public holidays". Hours are the field everyone forgets and the one an assistant is most often asked for.
5. Area served — the towns or region you actually travel to. A plumber in St Helens who covers Binalong Bay and Scamander should say so; "Tasmania" tells a machine nothing useful.

What to send your web person

Copy the block below, replace the capitalised parts with your details, and send it with one line: "Could you add this to the site so search engines and AI assistants can read it? It should only describe details already shown on the page."

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "YOUR BUSINESS NAME",
  "telephone": "+61 YOUR PHONE IN INTERNATIONAL FORM",
  "url": "https://YOURDOMAIN.com.au",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "YOUR STREET",
    "addressLocality": "YOUR SUBURB",
    "addressRegion": "TAS",
    "postalCode": "YOUR POSTCODE",
    "addressCountry": "AU"
  },
  "areaServed": ["St Helens", "Binalong Bay", "Scamander"],
  "openingHoursSpecification": [{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
    "opens": "07:00",
    "closes": "16:00"
  }]
}
</script>

The areaServed list is the one to change most. Name the towns you genuinely work in — not the whole state — because that is how a machine decides whether to mention you when someone asks about a town thirty kilometres away.

Three ways this goes wrong

• The placeholder never got replaced. We found 123-456-7890 and [email protected] still live on 41 of the 1,045 Tasmanian sites we checked. If your footer still has a template phone number, an assistant may quote it.
• Two versions of the truth. Your site says one phone number, your Google profile says another. Machines pick one, and it may not be the one that rings.
• Markup for something you are not. Listing every service in the state as your area, or marking up reviews that do not exist, is the only way this technique ever becomes a liability.

Then check it worked

Paste your page into an AI assistant again and ask the three questions from the ten-minute test. Then ask your web person to run the page through Google's Rich Results Test, which reports exactly what it can parse.

If nobody maintains your site, the free audit reads the page the way the machine does and writes back the block, filled in, ready to paste.