A business with nothing to attach its reputation to

The node everything else hangs off

An organization node is the centre of a site’s graph. It is the publisher of your articles, the owner of your WebSite, the seller behind your offers and the subject of your reviews. Without it, each of those is a claim with no subject.

It is also where sameAs lives, which is how a search engine connects the company on your site to the company on LinkedIn, Crunchbase and Wikidata. That corroboration is most of what a knowledge panel is assembled from.

The rule only fires when the site presents as a business. A documentation site legitimately has no organization, and telling it to declare one would be advice to publish markup that is not true. A personal site is also left alone, even though it has an about page and a contact page: when the site declares a named Person and no products or offers, the thing behind it is that person.

What squirrel checks

The rule runs once per crawl, reads the entity map rather than the pages, and emits a single check named entity-organization-missing.

• Skipped with the message No entity map was built for this audit and the reason entity-map-unavailable when the run produced no map. This is not the same as a site with no structured data, and the rule refuses to conflate them: passing here would assert it had checked something it never looked at.
• Reports at info with the message This site declares no JSON-LD entities on any crawled page when the map exists and is empty.
• Passes with the message This site declares N organization entities.
• Skipped with the message This site does not present as a business and the reason no-business-signals.
• Skipped with the message This site presents a person rather than an organization and the reason personal-site, when a named Person is declared and no products or offers are.
• Reports at info with the message This site presents as a business but declares no Organization or LocalBusiness entity, with the signals that made it a question listed in the value.

Two signals count as presenting as a business: an AboutPage or ContactPage entity, and Product or Offer entities. A site transacting with nothing to say who it is transacting with is the second case.

Organization, Corporation and the LocalBusiness subtypes all satisfy the rule. The subtype list is explicit rather than pattern-matched, because the names do not follow one: BankOrCreditUnion and Dentist are subtypes and end in neither Business nor Service, while OnlineStore ends in Store and is not one.

Findings are capped at 10 items, and the count in the message is always the true total rather than the capped length. Run squirrel entities -f json and read the entities key for the full list.

How to fix it

Declare it once, with everything that identifies you:

{
  "@type": "Organization",
  "@id": "https://example.com/#organization",
  "name": "Example Ltd",
  "url": "https://example.com/",
  "logo": "https://example.com/logo.png",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/example",
    "https://x.com/example"
  ]
}

If you have a physical location customers visit, use a LocalBusiness subtype instead and add the address, phone and opening hours. Then reference this @id as the publisher of your articles and the owner of your WebSite. See fixing structured data identity.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["schema/entity-organization-missing"]

Disable all Structured Data rules

[rules]
disable = ["schema/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["schema/entity-organization-missing"]

enable replaces the default ["*"], so this is the only rule selected. Leave disable out: a rule that matches any disable pattern is skipped even when enable names it. Only an enabled setting under a rule’s own [rule_options] table overrides both lists.

Related rules

• schema/organization: the per-page check that the Organization block is complete.
• schema/entity-sameas-missing: an organization declared without its profiles.
• schema/local-business: the per-page check for a LocalBusiness block.
• schema/entity-publisher-mismatch: articles that name different publishers.

Entity findings are site-wide and ship in every audit, next to the per-page structured data rules. See Fix SEO issues with AI for how an agent works through a report.

References

• Organization structured data, Google Search Central
• Organization, schema.org
• Local business structured data, Google Search Central

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com, then squirrel entities to see the graph the finding came from. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.