Schema.org for AI search: the 5 types that actually matter

Structured data is a machine-readable statement of facts about your page, written in JSON-LD and embedded in the HTML. For classic SEO it earned rich snippets. For AI search it does something more fundamental: it lets a model confirm who you are, what you sell and what it costs — before deciding whether it's safe to say that in an answer. Models are conservative. Unconfirmed facts get left out.

Schema.org has hundreds of types. Five of them do almost all the work.

1. Organization — the one nobody should skip

This is your identity record: name, URL, logo, contact, and — critically — sameAs, the list of your profiles elsewhere. sameAs is what turns a name on a page into a recognized entity: it lets a model connect your site to your LinkedIn, your GitHub, your directory listings, and confirm they are the same business. If your brand name is shared with other companies (ours is), this is the difference between being described accurately and being confused with someone else.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "@id": "https://yoursite.com/#org",
  "name": "Your Business",
  "url": "https://yoursite.com/",
  "logo": "https://yoursite.com/logo.png",
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/your-business/",
    "https://www.google.com/maps/place/..."
  ]
}

2. LocalBusiness — if customers come to you

A subtype of Organization with the facts local queries turn on: address, telephone, geo, openingHoursSpecification, priceRange. When someone asks an assistant for "the best X near me", these are the fields the answer is assembled from. Make sure every one of them matches your Google Business Profile exactly — contradictions between sources are read as low trust.

3. Service and Offer — what you sell, at what price

Prices are the single most quotable fact a business has, and most sites hide them from machines by putting them only in an image or a PDF. A Service with an Offer that carries price and priceCurrency states it plainly. Our own site does exactly this for its $99 audit, which is why an assistant can answer "how much does a Mentio audit cost" without guessing.

4. FAQPage — clean question-answer pairs

Google restricted FAQ rich results to a narrow set of sites in 2023, so the SEO payoff is mostly gone. Keep the markup anyway: it hands language models perfectly delimited Q&A pairs, in your words, on the questions you chose. It costs nothing and it's some of the most liftable content on your page.

5. Article — for anything you publish

headline, datePublished, dateModified, author, publisher. Two details matter more than people expect. First, the dates: freshness is a real citation signal, and an article with no date is harder to trust. Second, the author — an @type: Person with a real name and a sameAs link is a stronger E-E-A-T signal than an anonymous organization byline.

The mistake that cancels it all out

Markup that doesn't match the visible page. If your JSON-LD says the price is $99 and the page says "contact us for pricing", you haven't confirmed a fact — you've created a contradiction, and a conservative model resolves contradictions by staying silent about you. Structured data is a mirror of the page, not a place to put claims the page doesn't make. Google says the same thing in its structured data guidelines.

Two smaller but common issues: multiple Organization definitions across pages that aren't linked by a shared @id (fragmenting your entity into several half-entities), and markup that validates but sits inside a page the crawler can't reach.

How to check yours

Paste your URL into validator.schema.org for correctness, and Google's Rich Results Test for eligibility. Read the output as three questions: is there any structured data at all; does it identify the business with contacts and sameAs; does everything in it also appear on the visible page?

FAQ

JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa?

JSON-LD. It's Google's recommended format, it sits in one block in the head, and it doesn't entangle your markup with your layout.

Do I need every type?

No. Organization is mandatory in practice; add LocalBusiness if you have a location, Service/Offer if you have priced services, FAQPage and Article if you have that content. Types you don't genuinely have are noise.

Will structured data alone get me cited?

No — it removes a reason not to cite you. Access, citable content and off-site mentions still do the rest, which is why our $99 audit checks all four layers rather than just the markup.