Findings · 2026-08-14
The two questions people ask most are the two facts almost nobody publishes
Declaring an entity is common. Declaring the specific facts an assistant is asked for is an order of magnitude rarer.
Are they open? and what does it cost? are the two most common questions anyone asks about a business. They are also, on the evidence, two of the least published machine-readable facts on the web.
The shape of it
In the schema-type detection population published by BuiltWith, read on 12 August 2026: Organization is found on roughly 354,000 sites. PostalAddress on roughly 109,000. ContactPoint near 92,000. Offer near 55,000. OpeningHoursSpecification near 23,000.
An important caveat, and it is the reason this is a shape and not a rate: those are marginal counts. Each row counts sites where that type was found somewhere. They are not a joint distribution, so you cannot divide one row by another and get a coverage percentage — we do not know which sites overlap. What the magnitudes support is the ordering, and the ordering is the finding.
Declaring that you exist is not the same as being answerable
Announcing we are an organisation with a name is easy, and it is what most structured data on the web amounts to. The fields that let an assistant actually answer a question — the hours, the price, the availability, a contact point it can act on — sit an order of magnitude below it.
An assistant asked is this place open now has three options: read a declared OpeningHoursSpecification, scrape hours out of a rendered page and hope, or decline. Only the first is reliable, and it is the one almost nobody publishes.
The failure mode nobody sees
This does not look like a defect from the inside. Your hours are on your website. A human reads them in a second. Nothing is broken, no validator complains, and every rank tracker is content.
What changed is that a growing share of the questions about your business are now answered by something that never loads your page the way a person does. For that reader, a fact that is not declared is a fact that does not exist.
The order to fix it in
Hours first, because the question is asked most and the answer is cheapest to publish. Then a contact point an agent can use. Then price or availability if you sell something. Everything after that is polish.
A free scan here reports which of these your site declares and which it only shows to humans.
Every figure above came out of this scanner.
Point it at your own domain and see the same measurements, free.