Structured data for AI search: what helps and what doesn't
Structured data (schema.org markup in JSON-LD) helps search engines understand what a page is about and who publishes it. Google says no special structured data is required for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no AI assistant has said markup gets you cited. It is still worth adding the basic types, because it makes your facts explicit and machine-readable, but it is not a GEO shortcut.
Updated · Citable
What Google says
Google's AI features documentation says that structured data is useful for sharing information in a machine-readable way, that the markup should match visible text, and that "there's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add" to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
Other assistants have not published any statement about markup. Many fetch the page and read its text, where JSON-LD is either ignored or treated as one more block of text.
Types worth adding
| Type | Where | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Homepage | Name, logo, description and sameAs links to official profiles: the core of your entity |
| WebSite | Homepage | Site name for search results |
| Product / SoftwareApplication | Product and pricing pages | Price, category and offers as explicit facts |
| Article | Guides and blog posts | Headline, dates and publisher |
| BreadcrumbList | All deep pages | Site structure, shown in results |
| FAQPage | Pages with a genuine FAQ | Explicit question-answer pairs (rich results now limited) |
| Review / AggregateRating | Only for third-party reviews you display legitimately | Self-serving reviews of your own business are not eligible for stars |
What is not worth the time
- Stuffing keywords into schema descriptions. It does not help and can look spammy.
- Marking up content that is not on the page. This breaks Google's guidelines.
- Obscure types in the hope that AI systems will read them. No engine has said it does.
- "AI schema" plugins that promise citations.
Where markup fits in the priority list
In order of impact on AI visibility: crawler access (AI crawlers and robots.txt), pages that rank, content written to be quoted, third-party mentions, consistent entity facts, and then markup as the tidy layer on top.
Questions people ask
Does FAQ schema help ChatGPT cite me?
There is no evidence that ChatGPT reads FAQ markup specially. A visible, well-written FAQ section helps, because it is text an assistant can quote.
Which format should I use?
JSON-LD in a script tag. Google recommends it, and it keeps markup separate from your HTML.