Restaurants, clinics, beauty salons and fitness clubs live on people nearby finding them in search. We measured 99 sites in 19 niches — 77% have no markup with address and opening hours. In service niches, where it is needed most, the picture is even worse.
There is a category of business for which search is first and foremost a question of “where nearby.” A restaurant, a dental practice, a beauty salon, a fitness club, a car repair shop, a construction crew. People are not searching for “the best in the world” but for “open now and fifteen minutes from here.”
That is exactly what local business markup exists for — a machine-readable description of the address, coordinates, phone number and opening hours right in the page code. We made the measurement on 7 and 8 August 2026 and repeated it on 17 September 2026; the figures below are from the repeat. From the outside we checked 99 Ukrainian sites across 19 niches: 76 of them have no local business markup — 77%.
And the most interesting part is not the overall figure but how it is distributed.
By niche, where being tied to a location is critical:
In five niches out of nine, not a single site has markup. Car repair stands out sharply for the better: two sites out of six lack it. It is the only service niche in the sample where most sites describe themselves as a local business.
In the product niches — furniture (3 of 4), jewelry (3 of 4), real estate (4 of 4), power tools (4 of 4), stationery (3 of 4), household chemicals (5 of 6), optics (4 of 7) — the picture is similar, although for a store shipping nationwide local business markup is less critical than for a salon with a single address.
First, the organization's listing in search. When a search engine is confident about the address, phone number and opening hours, it can show them next to the result: the address, a call button, an “Open” or “Closed until 9:00” label. Without markup, this data has to be extracted from the page text by guesswork — and the guess is either not made or made wrong.
Second, consistency between the site and the maps profile. The Google Business Profile and the site should confirm each other: the same address, the same phone number, the same hours. Markup on the site is exactly the machine-readable way to confirm this. Without it, all that remains is text, which may differ in format (“вул. Хрещатик, 1” vs “Khreshchatyk St, 1”) and not be read as a match.
Third, voice search and AI answers. A query like “dentist nearby open on Saturday” is handled not by a person reading the page but by a selection from structured data. A site without it simply does not make it into that selection — not because it is worse, but because nothing is known about it in the required format.
A search engine will usually find the address — it is in the company profile, in directories, in reviews. But opening hours are most often the variable nobody updates anywhere except the site. Holidays, shortened days, seasonal schedules.
Local business markup has a dedicated field for this, OpeningHoursSpecification, where the schedule is written in machine-readable format, including exceptions for specific dates. This lets the search engine show the correct “open/closed” status — and saves people from calling for nothing.
For a business that lives on phone calls, the difference between “the person saw you were open and called” and “the person saw an unclear result and moved on to the next one” is the entire conversion of local search.
LocalBusiness — or any of its subtypes: Restaurant, Dentist, BeautySalon, MedicalClinic, AutoRepair, HealthClub, Hotel, LegalService, FurnitureStore, ShoeStore.address, telephone, openingHoursSpecification and geo with coordinates: markup without these fields describes the organization but not its physical presence.Then run the page through Google's official Rich Results Test — it will show errors that may keep the markup from working even if it is formally present.
For a site with a single address — hours. It is one JSON-LD block in the home page template, filled in with the company's real data: name, address with postal code, coordinates, phone number, hours, links to its maps and social media profiles.
For a chain with several locations it is more complex: each location needs its own page with its own markup, otherwise the search engine will not tell the branches apart. That is no longer hours but days — but the effect is different too: each location becomes a separate result in the local search of its own neighborhood.
The samples are small — from 4 to 8 sites per niche, so the figure for a specific niche describes those specific sites on the date of the check, not the market as a whole. Sites that answered our script with an anti-bot stub page instead of content are excluded from all the counts — there were five of them. We checked whether markup was present, not whether it was correct: a site with formally present but faulty markup counts as “has it” in our data.
And we did not investigate the reasons: why exactly these sites have no markup and who built them are questions that an external measurement does not and cannot answer.
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Writes about what he builds himself: online stores on OpenCart, applications on Next.js, integrations and site speed. The articles carry measurements and checks a reader can repeat on their own project, not general advice. Commercial development since 2015.
Answers to common questions on the topic
It lets a search engine confidently show the address, phone, a call button and an Open/Closed status next to the result. Without it, those details have to be guessed from page text — and the guess is either not made or made wrong.
23 out of 99 — meaning 76 sites (77%) did not. The figures are from the repeat measurement of 17 September 2026. In five service niches out of nine, not a single checked site had it: construction companies, restaurants, tourism, fitness and beauty salons.
Less critical than for a salon with one address, but still useful: it describes the organization itself, not only a location. For a store without physical pickup, product and price markup is a higher priority.
The OpeningHoursSpecification field describes the schedule in machine format, including exceptions for specific dates. That allows the correct Open/Closed status to be shown — page text is read far less reliably.
Days rather than hours: each location needs its own page with its own markup, otherwise a search engine cannot tell branches apart. In return, each location becomes a separate result in its own neighborhood's local search.
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