What is Schema Markup?
Structured data vocabulary (schema.org) describing a page's meaning to machines — entity hygiene for search engines and AI pipelines.
Definition
Schema markup is the schema.org vocabulary for describing page content in machine-readable form — usually embedded as JSON-LD. It declares entities and their attributes: this is an Organization named Seeqly, this is an Article by this Person, this is a Product at this price.
Search engines use it for rich results and entity understanding; AI pipelines that parse HTML can consume it wherever the retrieval layer reads full markup.
Why it matters
The honest evidence: correlation studies split. Some find sites with robust schema earn ~30% more AI Overview visibility; a Search Atlas study found no independent correlation once quality is controlled; practitioner tests show LLM tokenizers sometimes deprioritize markup unless visible text reinforces it. The synthesis that survives scrutiny — schema is high-value hygiene for entity resolution and rich results, and worthless as a substitute for content: mark up what the page truly says, and never expect markup alone to earn citations.
Frequently asked
What schema should every brand implement?
Organization with sameAs (entity identity), Article with author Person markup, BreadcrumbList, Product where applicable, and DefinedTerm/FAQPage on educational content. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test.
Can schema hurt me?
Markup contradicting visible content can trigger manual actions and gets ignored by AI parsers. Keep it truthful and synchronized with page text.
Related terms
- AI Share of VoiceYour brand's percentage of mentions across AI answers for a prompt set, versus competitors — the market-share metric of AI search.
- Semantic SearchSearch by meaning rather than keyword matching — powered by embeddings, it's how retrieval systems decide what's relevant to a prompt.
- AI CitationsThe linked sources an AI assistant credits when generating an answer. Being cited is the AI-era equivalent of ranking #1.
- AI CrawlerBots operated by AI companies — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended — that fetch web content for model training or live answer retrieval.