AI search
Structured data is how machines read a business
Schema markup states in machine-readable terms what a page is claiming. The studies on whether it wins AI citations disagree with each other, and the honest reading is that it amplifies rather than causes.
7 min read
Everything on a web page is a claim in prose. A price is a number in a sentence. An address is a line in a footer. A person reads the layout and infers what is going on. A machine has to guess — unless you tell it.
Structured data is that telling. A block of JSON-LD in the page states, in a shared vocabulary, that this is a business, this is what it offers, this is where it operates, these are the questions it answers. No inference required.
The studies disagree, and that is informative
Anyone claiming certainty here has picked a study and ignored the others.
- The optimistic findings
- Analyses have reported sites with structured data and FAQ blocks seeing a substantial rise in AI citations, and pages with proper markup appearing in AI answers several times more often than pages without.
- The controlled finding
- A study tracking nearly 1,900 pages that added JSON-LD against around 4,000 control pages found no clear citation growth in AI Mode or ChatGPT.
- The reconciliation
- Sites that bother with structured data tend to be sites that bother with everything else. Correlation studies pick that up; controlled ones do not. Markup amplifies existing quality signals rather than manufacturing them.
Structured data will not make a thin page authoritative. It will stop a good page from being misunderstood, which is a different and more achievable goal.
Where it clearly earns its place
Set aside AI citations, where the evidence is contested, and the case is straightforward. Structured data is what produces rich results in ordinary search — the star ratings, the prices, the opening hours, the event dates. Those are visible, measurable, and not in dispute.
It also removes ambiguity that costs you elsewhere. A winery that sells bottles and also sells tasting visits is two different things to a machine. Stated properly, both are legible. Left as prose, one of them usually disappears.
What is worth marking up
- The organisation itself — name, what it does, where it operates, and the profiles that belong to it.
- Each service or product, as its own entity rather than a paragraph on a page.
- Real questions and answers, where the markup matches text a visitor can actually see.
- Local details for a business with a physical presence: address, area served, hours.
- Articles and case studies, so authorship and subject are explicit.
What happened to FAQ rich results
Worth knowing, because a lot of advice still assumes otherwise. Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites in 2023 after widespread abuse of the markup, and in May 2026 removed them from search entirely. The reporting and testing tools followed over the months after.
FAQPage remains a valid type and Google has confirmed it still parses the markup to understand a page. So the reason to write it has changed rather than disappeared: it is no longer a route to a visible search feature, and is now purely about being understood — by search engines, and by the assistants drawing on them. That is a weaker incentive, and a more honest one.
Treat structured data as documentation of the truth rather than as a lever. Done that way it is cheap, it is durable, and it stops the systems that describe your business from getting it wrong. That is worth having whether or not it ever wins a citation.
Structured data is part of the search work on every build we take on.
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Questions this raises.
- Which schema types matter most?
- For most businesses: the organisation itself, each service or product as its own entity, and local details where there is a physical presence. Articles and case studies benefit from having author and subject stated. Beyond that the returns fall off quickly — marking up everything is not better than marking up the right things.
- Do I still get FAQ rich results from FAQ schema?
- No. Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites in 2023 and removed them from search entirely in May 2026. FAQPage is still a valid type and Google still parses it to understand a page, so the markup retains value for comprehension — but the visible search feature is gone.
- Will structured data help if my content is thin?
- No. Markup describes what is on a page; it cannot add authority that is not there. The controlled evidence suggests schema amplifies existing quality signals rather than creating them, which is why it belongs after the content work rather than instead of it.
- How do I check my structured data is valid?
- Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator both parse a live URL and report what they found. Validating is worth doing after every template change, because structured data breaks silently — nothing on the page looks wrong when it stops being read.