# Organization schema: your company's data in markup

> What Schema.org's Organization type is, which properties Google recommends, where it goes in an online store, and why it has to match your site.

URL: https://clione.ai/glossary/organization-schema/
Lang: en

In a store's [structured data](/glossary/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](/glossary/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.[^schema-org-organization] The properties a store uses most:[^schema-org-organization]

| Property                  | What it says                                               |
| ------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------- |
| `name`                    | The name the company is known by                           |
| `legalName`               | The official name, for example the registered company name |
| `url`                     | The organization's website                                 |
| `logo`                    | The logo                                                   |
| `sameAs`                  | Pages on other sites that identify the same organization   |
| `address`, `contactPoint` | The address and the contact channels                       |
| `foundingDate`, `founder` | When it was founded and by whom                            |
| `hasMerchantReturnPolicy` | The [return policy](/glossary/return-policy/)              |

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.[^google-organization] Put another way, the markup turns your company into an [entity](/glossary/entity/) with its own data instead of a loose name in a block of text. The specifics from its documentation:[^google-organization]

- **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](/glossary/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.[^google-organization]

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.[^google-organization] And in its documentation on [merchant listings](/glossary/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.[^google-merchant-listing]

## 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.

```json
{
  "@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](/glossary/product-page/) repeats it only if it is different;[^google-merchant-listing] it has its own entry, [MerchantReturnPolicy](/glossary/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.


Marking your own store's average rating in the Organization node to get stars in Google's [rich results](/glossary/rich-results/). Google excludes it: if the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, its pages with organization or local business markup are not eligible for stars.[^google-review-snippet] Product ratings go on each product, with [AggregateRating](/glossary/aggregaterating/).


## 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`.[^google-organization]
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.[^google-organization]
5. **Run the URL through the [Rich Results Test](/glossary/rich-results-test/)** to see whether it reads the node and with what errors or warnings.[^rich-results-test]

## Related concept: Brand

Organization and [Brand](/glossary/brand-schema/) 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.[^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](/learn/structured-data/) lays out the rest of the terms, and the [JSON-LD](/glossary/json-ld/) entry shows how this node sits alongside the product's in the same block.