What schema markup does — and doesn't do
Let's set expectations honestly. Google has been clear that structured data is not a direct ranking factor. What it does: makes pages eligible for rich results (review stars, FAQ dropdowns, event cards, product info), disambiguates entities (this 'Avner Badach' is a person, this is his organization, they're related), and hands machines clean facts they'd otherwise have to infer. That third job is the growing one — retrieval systems behind AI answers benefit from unambiguous, structured statements of who/what/where, and entity clarity is foundational to showing up in AI answers at all.
Format: JSON-LD, in the head, generated from data
Use JSON-LD — a script block of type application/ld+json — which is Google's recommended format. It lives separately from your HTML, so it doesn't tangle with your templates the way microdata does, and it can be generated programmatically from the same data that renders the page. That last part is the professional standard: schema written by hand drifts out of sync with page content; schema generated from your CMS data can't.
The types that matter, in priority order
| Priority | Type | Where | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Organization (or LocalBusiness) | Site-wide | Your entity home: name, logo, sameAs links to real profiles — the anchor for everything else |
| 2 | Person | Author and about pages | Connects content to a credentialed human — E-E-A-T and entity resolution in one |
| 3 | Article / BlogPosting | Content pages | Author, dates, publisher — provenance signals for search and AI alike |
| 4 | FAQPage | Pages with visible Q&A | Matches how people query AI assistants; content pre-chunked for extraction |
| 5 | Product / Service / Offer | Commercial pages | Prices, availability, ratings — feeds shopping surfaces and comparison answers |
| 6 | BreadcrumbList, WebSite, HowTo, Event, Review | As applicable | Structural and situational — valuable where they genuinely apply |
For local businesses, LocalBusiness (with the correct subtype — Dentist, Plumber, Attorney) replaces Organization at priority one, and should carry address, geo coordinates, opening hours, and price range that exactly match your Google Business Profile. Inconsistency between your markup and your GBP is the kind of contradiction that erodes machine trust in both.
The rules that keep you out of trouble
- Mark up only what's visible on the page. Invisible-content markup is a spam policy violation Google issues manual actions for.
- Be truthful: no invented ratings, no self-serving reviews marked up as third-party, no fake availability.
- One entity, one authoritative definition: define your Organization fully once (usually the homepage) and reference it elsewhere — don't redefine it differently on every page.
- Use sameAs to connect your entity to profiles that verify it: LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, industry registries, Wikipedia/Wikidata if you legitimately have them.
- Validate with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator — warnings are optional-field suggestions; errors mean the markup may be ignored entirely.
- Keep it in sync: when the page changes, the markup must change. Stale schema (old prices, past events, renamed services) is worse than none.
Schema and AI engines: the honest state of things
Does schema markup directly cause AI citations? Nobody outside the AI labs can prove that, and I won't claim it. What's solidly established: structured data helps search engines build their understanding of entities, search indexes feed retrieval for AI answers (Ahrefs found a large share of AI Overview citations come from ranking pages), and generative engines demonstrably favor content with clear, extractable facts — which is what schema-disciplined pages tend to be. I treat schema as cheap, compounding infrastructure: it costs little, it can't hurt when done honestly, and every machine reading your site — crawler, knowledge graph, or LLM retrieval pipeline — gets a cleaner picture of you.