Business details: legal name, area served, services
There is exactly one place in AISA where you write your business details: the Business details card on the Local SEO (Google) page. From there those values spread into the structured data, into llms.txt, into the title and description variants and into the Q&A answers. Filling them in is the best half hour you can spend in the plugin, because you are not filling a field for its own sake: you fill it once and five different things improve.
In 2.0 the card gains four fields, three of which had never been structured before.
The fields
Legal name and VAT number
Two fields side by side on one row: Legal name / VAT number.
The legal name is the name the company is registered under — "Acme Ltd" — which is often not the brand name. The VAT number is the one on your invoices. They are published as legalName and vatID in the structured data, and they tell an engine that behind the site there is a registered company and not just a website.
They are public information by nature, but the choice stays yours: leave them empty and nothing is published.
Area served, as a typed list
The Area served (typed list) field is a text box, one entry per line, with an optional type in front:
Country: Italy
AdministrativeArea: Lombardy
City: Milan
AISA recognises three types: Country for a country, AdministrativeArea for a region or province, City for a town. If you leave the type out, the place is published as a generic place. That is not a loss: it is a true statement instead of a wrong one, which is always the right trade.
This list feeds areaServed in the structured data and the Location line of llms.txt.
Above it there is still the old free-text Area served field. It stays as a fallback and the update never touches it, but what reaches the schema and llms.txt is the typed list. If the two fields say different things, the list wins.
Services
The Services field is one entry per line as well, with three parts separated by a vertical bar:
Service name | short description | https://your-site.com/service-page
Name, description and URL. The description and the address are optional: if all you have is the names, write the names.
This list is published as hasOfferCatalog, and it is how an answer engine learns what you do, not only who you are. That distinction matters: an Organization with no offering is a name; an Organization with a catalogue of services is a company that does specific things.
The one-entry-per-line format
It applies to the area served and to the services, and the rule is always the same: one line, one thing. No commas as separators, no list inside a line. Empty lines are ignored.
Two typical mistakes to avoid:
- A sentence instead of a list. "We work across Italy, in Switzerland and in international markets" is a sentence, and in a schema it is worth nothing. The lines have to be place names:
Country: Italy, thenCountry: Switzerland. - Everything on one line.
Italy, Lombardy, Milanis one entry with an odd name, not three places. They belong on three lines.
"Autofill with AI"
The Autofill with AI button — called "Detect from site" in earlier versions — reads your site and proposes the values it can derive from it: address, phone numbers, email, opening hours, area served and, from 2.0, the legal name and VAT number too.
Two things worth knowing about how it works:
It reads your site from the database, not from the internet. It looks at your contact page and your footer — widgets and template parts included — with no outbound HTTP request at all. That is where these details are almost always already written today, just in the form of prose.
It proposes, it does not decide. Before writing anything it shows you a field-by-field comparison: what is there now, what it proposes, and a tick box for each. You apply only what convinces you, and applying only fills the form: the database is touched when you press Save business details. If it finds nothing new, it says so and changes nothing.
It counts as an AI operation: the cost is shown before the click and, in the free plugin, it draws on the operations budget like any other generation.
There is also, if you have connected your Google Business listing, the button that pre-fills the empty fields only with Google's data: it does not overwrite what you have already written.
Where these details end up
One field, filled in once, works in five places.
In the structured data (JSON-LD). Legal name, VAT number, address, phone, email, area served and the service catalogue enter the organization node. If Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO is on the site, AISA does not add a second block: it enriches your SEO plugin's node, filling only the keys that are missing. A value you wrote yourself is never replaced, and social profiles are merged without duplicates.
In llms.txt. The Location line is built from the typed area-served list. If you change those fields, the saved document regenerates itself — unless you wrote a version by hand, which is never touched.
In the title and description variants. On the home page and on service pages, with an area served configured, AISA asks the model that at least two variants out of five name the place, and afterwards it actually counts them: if too few do, it regenerates only the missing variants once. If that does not improve things, the originals are kept.
In the Q&A answers. Questions about your address, hours and contacts are generated with your real details in front of the model, together with an explicit list of the ones that are missing. That is what removed the invented answers: previously the model only received the free text of the Brand Context, and that is where opening hours and territories nobody had mentioned came from.
In the audit checks. With an area served configured, the audit of a local page flags it when the page text never names the place — a frequent case, and an easy one to fix.
The rule: an empty field means no key in the schema
A field you leave empty does not produce an empty key in the structured data: it produces no key at all. You will not find "telephone": "" or a half-written address.
It is the same principle as the Q&A: better to say nothing than to state something untrue. A schema with six true properties is more useful than one with twelve properties, six of them invented — for the engines, which can verify them, and for you, whose name is on it.
The rest of the behaviour follows from there: the typed list starts empty rather than guessing the types, a place with no type becomes a generic place rather than some arbitrary region, and LocalBusiness is not proposed without a real address, because a local business without an address is a contradiction Google notices.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to fill everything in? No. Fill in what you know. Every field you fill adds a true property; every field you leave empty adds nothing and does no harm.
I have connected Google Business: do I still need this form? Yes, for what Google does not hold. The Google listing takes precedence on the fields it overlaps, but the legal name, the VAT number, the typed area served and the service catalogue are not things a Google listing contains: you write those here.
I do not want my VAT number public. Leave the field empty and it will not be published.
I updated and the area-served list is empty, while the old free-text field is full. That is the intended behaviour. The free-text field is never touched and keeps acting as a fallback; the typed list starts empty, or pre-filled only if that text was already a list of short names — not if it was a sentence. Filling it in by hand takes a minute and changes what reaches the schema.
I changed the area served: do I have to rebuild llms.txt? Not if the document is the one AISA generates: it rebuilds itself. If you saved a hand-written version, that stays exactly as you wrote it and you update it yourself if you want to.
Where do I find these fields? The AISA menu → Local SEO (Google) → Business details card. It is the only form where these values are edited; the schema, llms.txt and the GEO context all read from there.