What is Schema.org's Organization type (organization schema)?

In a store's structured data, almost everything is about products: the name, the price, the stock. Organization is the exception: the node that says who is behind the store, with its name, legal name, website and logo. It is a Schema.org type, and it has nothing to do with how the site is organized or how your categories are structured. It matters because it is how you tell Google, without making it guess, which company is yours and how it differs from others with a similar name, and because the logo Google shows and the return and shipping data in your merchant panel can come from it.

How it works

Schema.org defines Organization as an organization, whether a school, a nonprofit, a company or a club, and it has more specific subtypes, including the corporation, the local business and the online business.⁠^{[1]Schema.org. Organization} The properties a store uses most:⁠^{[1]Schema.org. Organization}

Google explains what it wants it for: adding it to the home page can help it understand your organization's administrative details and tell it apart from others in the results. Some properties do that behind the scenes and others can influence what shows, such as the logo it displays in results and in the knowledge panel.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Organization (Organization) structured data} Put another way, the markup turns your company into an entity with its own data instead of a loose name in a block of text. The specifics from its documentation:⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Organization (Organization) structured data}

• No required properties. It asks you to add the ones that apply to your organization.
• The most specific subtype. For an ecommerce site it recommends OnlineStore over OnlineBusiness.
• One page is enough. It recommends putting it on the home page or on a page that describes the organization, such as the about page, and adds that it is not needed on every page of the site.
• The URL identifies. It says url helps it uniquely identify your organization; and that sameAs is the URL of a page on another site with more information about it.
• The logo has minimums: at least 112 × 112 pixels, at a URL that can be crawled and indexed.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Organization (Organization) structured data}

For a merchant there is one more part. Google says that with hasMerchantReturnPolicy and hasShippingService, plus the address and contact details, you can influence the data it shows in the merchant panel and the brand profile.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Organization (Organization) structured data} And in its documentation on merchant listings it recommends giving the business's general return policy in the Organization markup instead of repeating it on every offer, and the same for shipping; the offer carries it only when it is an exception.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data}

In a store

An online store's node on the home page. Fictional example: the company, the address, the profiles and the URLs are made up.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "OnlineStore",
  "@id": "https://www.example.com/#organization",
  "name": "Calella",
  "legalName": "Calella Textile, Inc.",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "logo": "https://www.example.com/img/logo-calella.png",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/calella.example",
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/calella-example"
  ],
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "addressLocality": "Portland",
    "addressRegion": "OR",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "hasMerchantReturnPolicy": {
    "@type": "MerchantReturnPolicy",
    "applicableCountry": "US",
    "returnPolicyCategory": "https://schema.org/MerchantReturnFiniteReturnWindow",
    "merchantReturnDays": 30
  }
}

Every line has to be something you can point to on a page the customer sees: the trade name in the header, the registered company name on the legal page, the logo on the site, the sameAs profiles linked from the footer, the return policy on its own page. The @id lets the other nodes on the site, such as the seller of each offer, point to this same organization instead of describing it again. The return policy goes here because it is the store's general one, as Google recommends, and a specific product page repeats it only if it is different;⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} it has its own entry, MerchantReturnPolicy.

On a page published with Clione, the Organization node goes inside the same graph as the product, and is filled in with the store's organization data: name, legal name, URL, logo, description, industry and founding date.

How to check it

1. Open your home page's source code and look for Organization or OnlineStore. If neither appears, the store does not describe itself in markup.
2. Check the subtype. For an online store, Google recommends OnlineStore over OnlineBusiness.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Organization (Organization) structured data}
3. Check each property against the site: the name, the registered name, the address and the sameAs profiles have to be the ones the company really uses.
4. Check the logo: at least 112 × 112 pixels and at a URL that can be crawled and indexed.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Organization (Organization) structured data}
5. Run the URL through the Rich Results Test to see whether it reads the node and with what errors or warnings.⁠^{[5]Search Console Help. Rich Results Test}

Related concept: Brand

Organization and Brand get confused mostly in stores that sell other people's brands. Organization is the company; Brand is a product's brand, which may belong to another company. Schema.org separates them with Organization's brand property, which collects the brands an organization maintains.⁠^{[1]Schema.org. Organization} A multi-brand store is a single Organization, its own, and each of its products carries the manufacturer's brand: putting the store's name as the brand of the whole catalog says something that is not true.

To keep going, the structured data reading path lays out the rest of the terms, and the JSON-LD entry shows how this node sits alongside the product's in the same block.