We checked the homepage structured data of 50 well-known software companies. 55% of the 44 we could read do not state, in machine-readable form, what category they are in. Nine of them, including Notion, Airtable and Substack, publish no Organization schema at all. Every one of these companies has a marketing team. Most of them sell to marketers. The gap is not a small-business problem.
This is our own data, gathered on 1 September 2026. The method is below, the threshold we used is stated plainly so you can disagree with it, and the companies that blocked us are counted rather than quietly dropped.
What we measured, and why these five things
Organization schema is the block of structured data on a homepage that states, as data rather than as prose to be interpreted, what an organisation is. We checked the five fields that actually change what a machine can conclude about you:
- Is there an Organization node at all? If not, everything below is moot.
- Does it carry a description? The node can exist with nothing useful in it.
- Does that description name a category? “The connective tissue of modern work” is memorable and tells a machine nothing.
- Is
sameAspresent? This is the field that says which external profiles are this same entity. Without it, the connection is guesswork. - Is a logo set? Cheap to add, used in several result types.
The results
| Finding | Count | Share of the 44 read |
|---|---|---|
| No Organization schema on the homepage at all | 9 | 20% |
| Has Organization schema, but no description in it | 11 | 25% |
| Has a description, but it is a slogan with no category word | 4 | 9% |
| Description actually names a category | 20 | 45% |
No sameAs at all | 14 | 32% |
| No logo | 7 | 16% |
Add the first three rows together and 55% of these companies have no machine-readable statement of what they are. Fewer than half clear a bar that takes an hour to clear.
The nine with no Organization schema at all
Substack, Hootsuite, Hotjar, Mixpanel, Segment, Drift, Notion, Airtable and Gumroad. We re-checked these with an ordinary desktop browser user agent to rule out our request being treated differently, and the homepage HTML contained no JSON-LD either way.
These are not small or unsophisticated companies. That is what makes the finding interesting: this is not a resources problem, it is an attention problem. Nobody owns the file, so nobody opens it.
The eleven with a description field left empty
Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, Moosend, Moz, Amplitude, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, Calendly and Figma all publish an Organization node with no description in it. This is the most fixable finding in the study. The block already exists. One field is blank.
How we did it, precisely
- Fetched the homepage of each of 50 marketing, sales and SMB software companies on 1 September 2026.
- Parsed every
application/ld+jsonblock and walked it for any node typed Organization, Corporation, LocalBusiness, OnlineBusiness or SoftwareApplication. - Recorded the description, the number of
sameAsentries, and whether a logo was set. - Classified each description: none if empty; tagline if under six words; no category word if it never uses a word like platform, software, tool, service, provider, system, suite, CRM or analytics; otherwise category.
What this study does not show
Four limits, stated because a number without its limits is not evidence:
- Six of the 50 could not be read and are excluded from all percentages: Brevo returned a 404 to our request, and Constant Contact, Drip, ConvertKit, Freshworks and Canva returned 403. We do not know what their schema says. They are not counted as failures, because that would be inventing data.
- This is a convenience sample, not a random one. Fifty recognisable vendors in one broad category. It does not generalise to all businesses, and a different fifty would give different numbers.
- Homepage only. Schema may exist on an about page or be injected later by JavaScript. We read the HTML as served.
- The category-word test is crude. It is a keyword check, not comprehension. We published the exact word list above so you can judge it rather than take our word for it.
None of these limits change the headline, because the headline is a floor. A company with no Organization node has none regardless of how the sample was drawn.
The part where we admit we failed our own test
On the morning we ran this study, Promptly Market would have been in the 55%.
Our Organization description was the literal string #tagline, a placeholder our SEO plugin ships with, which rendered as our four-word slogan. Our sameAs was empty. No logo. We publish articles telling people that a tagline is not a description and that sameAs is the highest-value field in the block, and our own homepage did neither.
We found it by running this study’s own checks against ourselves before running them against anyone else. It is fixed now, which is the only reason we are comfortable publishing the numbers.
We mention it because it explains the result better than any theory would. This is not a knowledge gap. It is a nobody-opened-the-file gap. The plugin default sat there because the screen it lives on is not part of anyone’s weekly routine, and there is no report anywhere that says “your description is still a placeholder”. That is exactly why 20 of 44 well-resourced companies are in the same position.
Why this is worth an hour
Search engines and AI answer engines resolve a name to a specific thing before they answer anything about it. When they cannot do that confidently, they do not fail loudly. They describe you vaguely, blend you with a similarly named company, or leave you out of a comparison where you belonged. None of that shows up as a ranking drop, which is why it goes unnoticed for years.
Structured data will not manufacture authority you have not earned, and we are not claiming it is a ranking lever. What it does is remove ambiguity about what you are, in the one format built to be read by machines rather than interpreted.
The exact markup worth having, and the five mistakes that make schema worse than having none, are in Schema Markup for Brand Entities. If your description turns out to be a placeholder like ours was, the wider method is The Entity Consistency System.
Check your own in about two minutes
- Open your homepage, view source, and search for
ld+json. - Find the node typed
Organization. If there is more than one, you have a conflict to resolve first. - Read its
descriptionout loud. Does it say what category you are in, in words a customer would use? Is it still a plugin placeholder? - Check
sameAs. Empty puts you in the 32%.
Using this data: the figures above are free to cite with a link to this page. If you want the per-company rows behind them, ask us and we will send them.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many companies have no Organization schema?
In this study, 9 of the 44 homepages we could read carried no Organization schema at all, which is 20%. They were Substack, Hootsuite, Hotjar, Mixpanel, Segment, Drift, Notion, Airtable and Gumroad, checked on 1 September 2026 and re-verified with a standard desktop browser user agent.
What share of companies describe themselves in machine-readable form?
45%. The other 55% split into 20% with no Organization schema, 25% with the schema but an empty description field, and 9% whose description is a slogan containing no word identifying their category.
Why does an empty sameAs matter?
sameAs is the explicit statement that a set of external profiles refers to the same entity as this site. Without it, a machine has to infer the connection between your homepage and your LinkedIn or YouTube presence. In this study 32% of companies made no such statement at all.
Can I cite this data?
Yes, freely, with a link to this page. It was gathered on 1 September 2026 across 50 marketing, sales and SMB software homepages, of which 44 were readable. The method, the classification threshold and the six companies that blocked our request are all stated above so the work can be checked or repeated.
Does adding Organization schema improve rankings?
Not as a direct ranking lever, and treat anyone promising that with suspicion. It removes ambiguity about what you are, which affects how confidently you are identified and whether you qualify for richer result types. It will not manufacture authority you have not earned.