Schema markup is the quiet machinery behind AI visibility. It is structured data added to your pages that tells an assistant, in a form it cannot misread, exactly what your gym is and offers. Get it right and you hand the machine the facts. Get it wrong, or leave it out, and the assistant has to guess, which usually means it skips you.
Most studios either have no schema or have the wrong kind, copied from a template that was never meant for fitness. Here are the fields that matter most, and the mistakes we see again and again.
1. The wrong @type
A lot of gym sites declare themselves as a generic LocalBusiness, or worse, nothing at all. Use the specific types. HealthClub and SportsActivityLocation are recognised types built for exactly your situation. The more specific type tells an assistant precisely what kind of business it is dealing with, and what kind of question you should turn up for.
2. openingHoursSpecification done as free text
Hours written as a sentence are easy for a person and ambiguous for a machine. openingHoursSpecification lets you state each day, open and close, including different weekend and holiday hours, in a structured way. Gyms change hours often, so this is also the field that most drifts out of date. Keep it accurate and consistent with Google and your booking app.
3. No class or schedule data
This is the big one studios miss. Your timetable is your product, and it usually lives in a booking widget an assistant cannot read. Expressing classes as structured Event or schedule data, with names, times, and instructors, is the difference between an assistant knowing you run a beginner spin class on Tuesday evenings and an assistant knowing only that a booking page exists.
4. Trainers with no structure
When someone asks for a PT for a specific goal, an assistant looks for coaches it can match to that goal. Marking up your trainers, with their names and specialties, gives it something to work with. A page of photos with no structure gives it nothing, so it recommends a gym whose coaching it can actually read.
5. No connection between the parts
Even when the fields exist, they often float free, with the gym, its classes, its trainers, and its reviews living as disconnected fragments. Tying them together with proper identifiers lets an assistant see one coherent entity rather than a pile of unrelated facts. A coherent entity is one it can recommend with confidence.
A short checklist
- Use a specific type like
HealthClub, not a generic one. - Mark up hours with
openingHoursSpecificationand keep them current. - Express your timetable as structured class and schedule data.
- Mark up your trainers and their specialties.
- Connect the pieces so they read as one entity.
None of this changes how your site looks to a member. All of it changes how readable you are to the assistants now deciding where that member trains. If you want to know which of these you are missing, a free AI visibility check will show you, in plain language.