Schema that lies about you
Structured data is a set of claims you make to search engines about your business, in your own name. When a tool or plugin writes it for you, it can make claims you'd never sign.
Real examples
In October 2026 we saved the structured data an SEO platform's JavaScript pixel was injecting into small-business sites (the full test). Among the claims:
- A fake logo. The business's logo pointed at Google's favicon service, a tiny auto-generated icon, not the company's real logo.
- A false license. Image markup said the sites' photos were licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC, including a stock photo. The tool had no way to know any image's license. That's a legal claim about someone else's photo, published in the site owner's name.
- Stale data. One site's injected description was an old version the owner had already replaced.
The rules you're agreeing to
- Google's structured data guidelines say markup must describe content that's visible on the page and must not be misleading.
- Since 2019, Google doesn't show review stars for a business's reviews of itself marked up on its own site.
- Misleading or spammy markup can earn a manual action, which takes away your eligibility for rich results.
Why it happens
Most structured data is written by plugins and tools, not people. They fill every field they can, from whatever they can find, because a "complete" schema looks good in a report. Nobody reads the output, so nobody notices when a field is wrong.
The fix
Read your structured data the way you'd read a contract: every field is something you're stating as fact. Remove anything you can't back up: placeholder logos, licenses you didn't grant, ratings that aren't on the page, authors who don't exist.
The free Schema Validator (my own product) lists the structured data types a page declares, whether they parse, and which recommended fields are missing, so you can see what you're claiming.