If your site uses a modern CMS, there's a reasonable chance it already outputs some form of structured data — often without anyone having deliberately configured it. Before adding anything new, it's worth understanding what's already there, and specifically, what it does and doesn't accomplish.

What auto-generated schema typically includes

Common auto-generated structured data tends to focus on page-level and site-level structural information: identifying pages as articles, web pages, or specific content types; basic organisation information; breadcrumb structures; and sometimes local business details if a relevant plugin is configured. This is structural schema — job one from earlier in this series — and it's often present even on sites where no one has thought about structured data at all.

What it typically doesn't include

What's usually absent is anything that references an external entity record — no connection to a structured knowledge base identifier, no explicit "this is the same entity as that external record" statement. The schema describes the page and, to some extent, the organisation — but doesn't connect either to anything outside the site.

How to check, in plain terms

Looking at your site's structured data (through any schema-checking tool, or by viewing page source for structured data blocks), the questions to ask are: does this describe my organisation or business as a specific type, with basic properties? And separately: does anything here reference an external identifier — a reference to a record in a structured knowledge base elsewhere? The first is common; the second is rare, and it's the piece most relevant to entity alignment specifically.

What a gap looks like: structural schema that correctly identifies your business, its address, and its category — but with no reference anywhere to an external entity record. This is the most common pattern, and it represents a site that's done "schema" in the conventional sense without doing entity alignment at all.

Turning the audit into a plan

If structural schema is solid but alignment is absent, the path forward is usually straightforward in concept (even if it requires care in execution): establish or confirm an entity record exists, then add the specific alignment properties referencing it — without needing to rebuild the structural schema that's already working.