Schema.org

Schema.org is a shared structured-data vocabulary maintained jointly by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. It defines standard types — Product, Article, FAQPage, Organization, HowTo — so machines can recognise what a page is actually about. It exists to unify the patchwork of competing microdata standards that came before, and it has become the de facto vocabulary of the structured web. Its value only grew in the GEO era.

Mechanically the work is semantic labelling. You embed Schema.org markup as JSON-LD inside the page, and search engines plus LLMs read those labels alongside the prose. The same '4.7' that is just text in the body becomes 'aggregateRating' under schema — now it is unambiguously a rating. When models compose answers, those structured signals push both accuracy and citation likelihood up.

For GEO the schema lift is straightforward: structured facts are easier to extract. Price, rating, stock, hours, author — once they are typed, AI is far more likely to lift them straight into an answer. Useful KPIs are citation rate on schema-tagged pages and source-card frequency in AI Overviews and Perplexity. Villion correlates schema coverage with citation rate so the ROI of structured-data work is visible.

Among signals the position is clear. Body content tells the model what you say, E-E-A-T tells it who is saying it, and Schema.org tells it the shape of what you say. The three reinforce each other. AI Overviews lean on schema directly via the search index, and both ChatGPT and Perplexity treat schema markup as a parsing signal when they read pages live.

Two myths to retire. First, the assumption that schema alone earns citations. It does not — schema raises eligibility, but only pays off when the underlying copy is accurate and well organised. Second, treating schema as a one-and-done install. Pages change, schema drifts out of sync with the visible content, and that mismatch is a negative signal in itself.

Sensible next steps: prioritise schema on core pages (brand, product, FAQ, article), ship it as JSON-LD for consistency, validate with Google's Rich Results Test, audit body-versus-schema alignment quarterly, and monitor whether AI answers cite your prices, ratings and definitions correctly. Even in the GEO era, Schema.org is still the highest-leverage piece of structured-data infrastructure you can ship.