Does Schema Help SEO and AI Visibility?
Should you implement Schema for SEO and AI Visibility? Let's see....
One of the biggest discussion points these days is the need for schema (structured markup) on your website.
Google has been very vague about how it uses schema. AI platforms remain quiet about that as well.
My personal opinion is that schema won’t hurt, so I see no reason for not using it.
But let’s dive deeper to clear all the confusion:
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1. There’s no such thing as a “supported” schema for rankings
Let’s clear this confusion right away.
Officially, schema does not influence organic rankings.
Google has a number of “supported” types that help generate “rich snippets”, i.e., enhanced search snippets that may show ratings, pricing, etc.
Google representatives did tell us that schema may help Google understand your site better.
Whether it is true or not, the SEO job is exactly about making it easier for search bots to understand a website. So, adding schema has always been part of my ESO roadmaps, with a low priority.
2. AI agents may not see the schema
AI agents are much less predictable than search crawlers. They may access your site in different ways.
Their first source is always training data, and schema is stripped from the training data.
When LLMs use a search tool, schema may be visible and helpful, but we won’t know that.
I’ve covered this in a more technical way on my Subreddit. Check it out.
3. *Some* studies show that schema may be helpful for both SEO and AI
To be clear, SEO studies are never 100% conclusive.
Yet, they are still helpful.
One study I covered previously seemed to show that schema helps get into AI Overviews (and organic rankings).
To be clear, AI Overviews are not LLMs. AI Overviews summarize search results, so organic search visibility directly helps get included in AI Overviews. So in this particular study, it is not quite clear if the schema helped search or AI visibility.
In either case, it helped with something, and that is good enough for me! If there is a small chance that schema helps organic search visibility, it is helpful everywhere (even if not directly).
4. Schema is easy to implement
There is no technical knowledge needed for schema implementation. In most cases, it is either already part of an ecommerce content management platform or can be added using plugins or apps.
For non-ecommerce sites or sections, there are schema generators that take minutes to create a schema code. We have a few:
Dataset Schema Generator (this one is cool for research and studies)