Schema markup that still matters for AI Overviews.

Google's documentation is blunt: there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special schema.org markup you need to add. We agree. We also still add structured data to every site we build. Both things are true.

Structured data doesn't buy a citation. What it does is remove ambiguity — about who wrote a page, which business it belongs to, what a product costs — for every system that reads your site, from Google's rich results to the assistants that ground their answers in the open web. Here's the short list that still earns its place.

Google has spent several years trimming the rich results it shows. HowTo results went in 2023. In 2025 a batch of lesser-used types followed, including Course Info, Claim Review, Estimated Salary and Vehicle Listing. And in May 2026, FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search altogether.

None of that made the markup harmful — Google has said unused structured data causes no problems — but it changed what's worth maintaining. We now ask one question of every type: does it describe something real and important about this page that a machine might otherwise get wrong?

That question matters more, not less, for AI answers. Assistants that ground their responses in web results still have to work out what a page is about and who stands behind it. Consistent entity data — the same names, addresses, authors and products on your site and on your profiles elsewhere — makes that easier, and structured data is one of the cheapest ways to state those facts once, explicitly.

1. 01

   Organization.

   Defined once, on the home page, with your legal name, logo, contact details and the profiles that belong to you. Every other page references it by @id instead of repeating it.

2. 02

   Article, with a real author.

   Headline, dates and an author marked up as a Person with a name, job title and a link to a profile page. It's the clearest machine-readable statement of who stands behind the content.

3. 03

   Product, with offers.

   Price, currency, availability and review data that match what's on the page. For stores, keep it consistent with your Merchant Center feed.

4. 04

   LocalBusiness, for anyone with an address.

   Name, address, phone number and opening hours that match your Google Business Profile word for word. For local SEO, consistency across your site, profile and directories matters more than any single tag.

We add BreadcrumbList across the site as well. It's cheap to maintain and it makes the site's structure explicit.

Author pages deserve a mention of their own. A Person in your markup should point to a real profile page on your site, with a photo, a short bio, relevant experience and links to the author's other work. That page is what a reader — or a model — uses to decide whether the name means anything.

With FAQ rich results gone from Google, FAQPage markup is no longer about search appearance. We still use it where a page has a genuine question-and-answer section, because it labels that content clearly for other consumers of structured data. We don't add FAQ blocks to pages just to carry markup. If the questions wouldn't help a reader, they won't help a model either.

The same goes for step-by-step content now that HowTo results are gone: write the steps clearly in the HTML, as a numbered list under a descriptive heading. That's what readers and models both use.

Markup drifts as sites change. A price updates in the CMS but not in a hard-coded block; an author leaves and their profile page disappears. We check it the same way on every audit.

• Run key templates through Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator after every release that touches them.
• Watch the structured data reports in Search Console for new errors, especially on product pages.
• Generate markup from the same data that renders the page, so the two can't disagree. Never hand-maintain JSON-LD for prices or stock.
• Spot-check that sameAs links, author profile URLs and logo files still resolve.

• Markup for content that isn't on the page. Reviews, ratings or prices a visitor can't see are a policy problem, not an optimisation.
• Stacking every possible type on one URL. One clear primary type per page, connected to your Organization, beats a pile of loosely related entities.
• New “AI files” for Google's sake. Google says Search doesn't use them; whether another service you care about does is a separate question.
• Plugin defaults you haven't read. SEO plugins often output generic or duplicated markup, so check what yours generates before adding more on top.

One last check while you're in Search Console: the Search generative AI setting lets site owners include or exclude their content from AI Overviews and AI Mode. Inclusion is the default, but it's worth confirming nobody switched it off. Our SEO & GEO team covers all of this in a standard technical audit, and the wider playbook is in GEO is the new SEO.

Written by

Maya Okafor

Head of SEO & GEO · 11 years in search

Maya leads our search practice, from technical audits to AI-answer visibility. Before Performative Web she ran SEO for two marketplaces through four core updates. She writes here about what's working now — with the client numbers to back it.

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