Schema Used for AEO / GEO: The Truth

About the schema in the new GEO Plugin by Squirrly SEO:

• we check for it, but it is not used by ChatGPT or Claude and Perplexity in the way you would normally imagine.

Google says it doesn’t read it, or care about it. The idea is that the AI cralwers actually check the entire HTML to make decisions and understand the content, so what Google actually means is that the schema tags (JSON-LD schema) is not read and interpreted in the way it is validated and then used inside classic SEO.

There were studies made, which we present in our free GEO Academy by AISQ Growth, where the pages from the study didn’t get any kind of uplift from having schema (JSON-LD definitions) inside the pages.

1. Truth 1: schema is a relic from old days when SEO agencies charged clients for schema implementations, because the implementations were easy to justify and show they are too advanced for the end-user to do on their own. However, the uplift in SEO results was always minimal, as the Squirrly SEO team has kept proving non-stop over the years. Just having one type of json-ld was enough to satisfy search engine criteria, and a page didn’t need 6 different types to make ends meet when it came to SEO, if the content on the actual page was good enough. Our agencies have never pushed these kinds of things on our clients, but it was what is was.
2. Truth 2: schema is visible within the html code of the page. So ChatGPT, Perplexity and the others read the things inside the JSON-LD … but they read it and that’s it. If they CAN extract any extra meaning related to Entity Data (read our new findings) that wasn’t available inside the written content found on the actual page that gets renedered in the browser, then it will take that new data into account. So that’s how it helps. But it doesn’t do any magic using “LocalBusiness”, “Software”, “Podcast”, etc in the way the market expects when learning about schema.org.

Because the pages from the studies had sufficient entitiy data, the schema implementations didn’t help at all. However, they would have helped otherwise, due to Truth 2.

So we will check in the GEO Audit inside our GEO Plugin by Squirrly SEO for schema implementations: mostly because that will ensure our users do not forget to keep writing and mentioning their entities. (again, this is important)