What schema markup do you need for AI search?

Why schema matters more for AI than for search

Rich results were the old reason to add schema. The new reason is better: schema is the only part of your page where facts are unambiguous. Everything else is prose a model has to interpret.

When an engine has to choose between two businesses and one of them states its hours, service area, phone number and offerings in machine-readable form, that one is cheaper to trust.

The minimum viable set

Five types cover almost every business, and adding more without accuracy is worse than adding fewer done properly.

• •Organization or LocalBusiness - name, url, logo, telephone, address, areaServed, sameAs
• •Service or Product - one per distinct offering, with provider and areaServed
• •FAQPage - every question and answer pair you publish
• •Article or TechArticle - for guides, with author, datePublished and dateModified
• •BreadcrumbList - a real hierarchy, matching your visible navigation

Use a connected @id graph

Isolated schema blocks on separate pages force an engine to guess that they describe the same company. Give your organization a stable @id such as https://yoursite.com/#organization and reference that same @id from every Service, Article and WebPage you publish.

One connected graph resolves to one confident entity. Fragments resolve to uncertainty.

sameAs is the field most people leave empty

sameAs is where you point at the independent profiles that corroborate you - LinkedIn, X, Crunchbase, Wikidata, industry associations, review platforms. It is how you convert "this company says it exists" into "several independent sources agree".

Only list URLs that are live and genuinely yours. A sameAs pointing at a dead or wrong profile is actively harmful, and pointing only at your own domains adds nothing at all.

Rules that keep schema from backfiring

Schema that contradicts the page or overstates reality is a liability. Two hard rules: every fact in your markup must be visible to a human on the same page, and never publish review or rating markup for reviews you did not actually receive.

Validate with Google Rich Results Test and Schema.org validator after every change.