From being read to being understood

The fix is to place the important facts on the page a second time, now with a label attached. Not visible to the visitor, but in the page's source: this is the name of the accommodation, this is the address, this is the number of guests, this is a review that belongs to this accommodation. A person does not need those labels. A machine does.

This is called structured data. The format Google recommends is JSON-LD. It sits in an invisible script in the page, next to the text the guest reads. What matters is that both come from the same source. The name in the label is the same name on the page, the guest count is the same count. The labelled version can never say anything different from what the visitor sees.

Picture a guest asking an AI assistant for a holiday home for six on the Egmond coast, with a garden. Such an assistant draws its answer from two sources. When it fetches a page on the spot, it reads the plain text. It also leans on the indexes of search engines such as Google and Bing, which read the labels as well. If both the text and the labels say the house sleeps six, is in Egmond and has a garden, the facts are there whichever source the assistant uses.

In the search results themselves, the labels work differently. Google uses them to understand what a page is about, which improves the odds of a richer result: not a bare blue link, but an entry with extra context. Google decides for itself when and how to show that, so there are no guarantees. The dedicated display for holiday homes runs through a separate programme. The groundwork for it, unambiguous facts in the page, is there regardless.

BonBooking builds this labelled version automatically, on every page, from the data the operator enters. Three kinds of fact go into it. Every page says who runs the site, with name, address and contact details, so a machine recognises the organisation behind the website. An accommodation page adds the things a guest weighs: the location, the maximum number of guests, the floor area, the amenities and the check-in and check-out times. Where reviews exist, the average goes in, along with the most recent ones.

Reviews deliberately keep the scale the site itself uses: a score out of 10. Converting it to five stars would give a different impression.

Because the labelled version comes from the same data as the visible page, it is only as good as its source. An accommodation with its floor area filled in, its check-in times right and its amenities complete gives a machine more to work with than a half-filled entry. The labelling happens on its own. What goes into it stays the operator's work.

Speed and readability decide whether a page is read. Structured data helps machines understand it as well. Together they are the invisible layer beneath the photos, the reviews and the descriptions a guest ultimately relies on.

At BonBooking the operator maintains no code and no loose labels, but does fill in the facts machines will later repeat. More about how it all fits together is on the website features page.