An Australian clinic website needs four kinds of schema markup that still do something: the most specific LocalBusiness subtype for the practice, Organization, Article on every blog post, and BreadcrumbList. Two of the types most clinic sites are still running do nothing at all. Google withdrew the FAQ rich result on 7 May 2026 and removed its documentation on 15 June 2026, and the How-to rich result went years before that. The third one is worse than useless. Review stars marked up on your own site are ineligible under Google's own guidelines, and republishing a patient review about clinical care is using a testimonial, which Section 133 of the National Law bans.
What does schema markup actually do for a clinic?
Schema markup is a block of code in your page. Patients never see it. It tells a search engine what the page is, in a format the engine does not have to guess at.
That is the whole idea. The rest is detail.
For a clinic, it does two useful jobs. It tells Google what kind of business you are and where you are, which feeds local results and Maps. And it labels your content with an author and a date, which is what an AI answer engine leans on when it decides whether to cite you.
What it does not do is lift your ranking on its own. Marking up a thin page does not make it a good page. If you want the wider picture, we covered where schema sits in a content programme and what a regulated page needs to get cited in AI search.
This post is about a narrower thing. Most clinic sites are running schema that has quietly stopped working, and one type that can get the practice into real trouble.
Which schema types still earn a Google rich result?
Google publishes a page called "All structured data features". It is the list of everything that can change how your result looks. If a type is not on it, the markup produces nothing in Google Search.
Here is where the common clinic types stand.
| Schema type | Still a Google feature | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Article. | Yes. It is on the current list. | Keep it on every blog post. Author, dates, headline, description. |
| BreadcrumbList. | Yes. Listed as Breadcrumb. | Keep it sitewide. It changes how the URL line renders. |
| LocalBusiness. | Yes. Listed as Local business. | Keep it, and use the most specific subtype you can. |
| Organization. | Yes. It is on the current list. | Keep it on the homepage and about page. |
| FAQPage. | No. Withdrawn from Google Search on 7 May 2026. | It earns nothing in Google now. Keep it only for AI engines and Bing, and stop counting it as an SEO win. |
| HowTo. | No. The documentation was removed and the rich result no longer shows. | Remove it or leave it. Either way it does nothing in Google. |
| Review and AggregateRating on your own clinic. | No. Self-serving reviews are ineligible. | Turn it off. See section five, because in Australian healthcare this one is not just wasted code. |
Check this yourself rather than take our word for it. Open Google's "All structured data features" page. FAQ and How-to are not on it. Both used to be.
Why did FAQ schema stop working, and should you delete it?
Google's own changelog records it in two steps, and the wording matters.
On 8 May 2026 Google added a deprecation notice, and the reason it gave was blunt. The feature "will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026".
On 15 June 2026 it went further and removed the documentation, because "the FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results".
There is a detail in that history that healthcare people should know. Back in September 2023, Google had already narrowed the FAQ rich result so that it "is only shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites". Health sites were the last group holding it. Now nobody has it.
So should you strip FAQPage out of your pages?
No, and this is where a lot of advice gets it wrong. The rich result is gone. The markup is still parsed by other systems, and question-and-answer pairs are exactly what an AI answer engine wants to lift. Keep the FAQ content, keep the markup if it is already there, and stop calling it a Google play. It is an AI and Bing play now.
The same honesty applies to llms.txt files. On 15 June 2026 Google clarified that these files "aren't needed for Google Search (and won't negatively or positively impact your visibility or rankings)".
Which schema type should a clinic use for itself?
Google's instruction on this is one sentence. Use "the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible".
Most clinic sites do not. They ship a generic LocalBusiness because that is what the plugin defaults to.
Schema.org has better options sitting there unused. A medical practice is a MedicalClinic, which sits in the hierarchy as Thing, then Organization, then LocalBusiness, then MedicalBusiness, then MedicalClinic. A single doctor or a doctor's practice is a Physician, in the same branch. A dental practice is a Dentist. A physiotherapy practice is a Physiotherapy.
The practical benefit is small but real. A more specific type gives the engine more to work with, and it costs nothing to change one string.
One useful mechanical detail. If your practice genuinely does two things, Google says to give the type as an array rather than reach for additionalType, which it does not support.
Do not stack types you cannot justify. A general practice is not a Hospital, and a salon with no registered health practitioner on the books is not a MedicalClinic. Schema has to match what the page actually says, and an overclaiming type is the same problem as an overclaiming headline.
Why are review stars a double problem for a clinic?
This is the part worth the read.
Almost every SEO plugin offers to put an average star rating into your markup. Many clinics have it switched on. It is the field people are proudest of, because stars in a search result look like the thing you are paying for.
It fails twice, for two completely unrelated reasons, and each one is enough on its own.
Google will not show it. The review snippet guidelines are explicit. "If the entity that's being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, their pages that use LocalBusiness or any other type of Organization structured data are ineligible for star review feature." Google spells out the case too: "a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A, either directly in their structured data or through an embedded third-party widget (for example, Google Business reviews or Facebook reviews widget)."
Read the widget clause again. Embedding a Google reviews widget on your own site does not get you around it. Google names that exact workaround and closes it.
AHPRA may treat it as a testimonial. Section 133 of the National Law bans advertising a regulated health service in a way that "uses testimonials or purported testimonials about the service or business". A patient's five-star review of their treatment, republished by you on your own site, is a statement about the service that you chose and placed.
So the field is invisible to Google and visible to a regulator. That is the worst combination a line of code can manage.
What does Section 133 say about testimonials?
The section is short, and the testimonial ban is one clause of five.
Section 133(1) says a person must not advertise a regulated health service, or a business that provides one, in a way that is false, misleading or deceptive or likely to be misleading or deceptive; that offers a gift, discount or other inducement without stating the terms and conditions; that "uses testimonials or purported testimonials about the service or business"; that "creates an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment"; or that "directly or indirectly encourages the indiscriminate or unnecessary use of regulated health services".
The maximum penalty sits inside the section. For an individual it is $60,000. For a body corporate it is $120,000. That text is the consolidated Queensland version of the National Law, current as at 10 April 2026.
Two things follow that people miss.
The ban is on the practice doing the advertising, not on patients having opinions. A patient can leave a Google review and nobody has breached anything. The line is crossed when the practice takes that review and republishes it as advertising. Structured data is publishing. It is a machine-readable claim you put on your own page.
The second is that this is our reading of how the section applies to markup, rather than a published AHPRA ruling about JSON-LD specifically. We think it is the safe reading, and the cost of following it is zero because Google ignores the field anyway. We have written up what actually counts as a testimonial in more detail, including where reviews about non-clinical things sit.
What belongs in a clinic page's schema?
Here is the working set. It is short on purpose.
| Page | Schema type | The fields that matter |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage. | Organization, plus the specific LocalBusiness subtype. | Name, address, telephone, url, openingHoursSpecification, geo, image. |
| Each location page, if you have more than one site. | One LocalBusiness subtype per physical location. | A separate address and separate opening hours for each. Do not reuse one block. |
| Practitioner profile pages. | Person, and Physician where the page is the practitioner's practice. | Name, jobTitle, the registration you actually hold, worksFor pointing at the practice. |
| Service pages. | Service or MedicalProcedure, referenced from the practice. | Name and a plain description. No outcome claims, no comparative language. |
| Blog posts. | Article. | Headline, author with a real profile URL, datePublished, dateModified, description, image. |
| Every page. | BreadcrumbList. | Position, name and item for each level, matching the visible breadcrumb. |
| Nothing, anywhere. | AggregateRating or Review about your own practice. | Leave the field out entirely. |
Two rules sit over all of it. The markup has to describe what is visible on the page. And the fields have to be true, which for a clinic means the description field is held to the same standard as the headline, because it is advertising the moment you publish it.
If you are also working on the local side, our guide to local SEO for clinics covers the Business Profile half of this, which is where reviews legitimately live.
How do you check your own schema in ten minutes?
You do not need a developer to find out what you are running.
- Open your homepage, view the page source, and search it for the word "schema". Every JSON-LD block will show up.
- Search that source for "aggregateRating" and for "ratingValue". If either is there, that is the field to remove first.
- Search for "FAQPage" and "HowTo". Neither earns a Google result now. Note them and move on rather than panic.
- Look at the "@type" on your main business block. If it says LocalBusiness, ask whether MedicalClinic, Physician, Dentist or Physiotherapy describes you better.
- Run the page through Google's Rich Results Test. It tells you what Google can actually produce from the page, which is a different question from whether the code is valid.
- Check that the address, phone number and opening hours in the markup match what is printed on the page. Stale markup is common after a practice moves or changes hours.
That whole list is a coffee's worth of work, and on most clinic sites it finds at least one thing.
The pattern underneath all of it is the same one we keep running into on healthcare SEO. The tooling is built for businesses that are allowed to advertise like ordinary businesses. A clinic is not one of those, so the defaults need checking rather than trusting. Reviews are the clearest case, and they will not be the last.
