Schema Markup is structured-data code you add to a site so search engines, and now AI models, understand the content better. It comes from a collaboration between Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex, and it translates your content into a language machines read without ambiguity.
For years, Schema mostly powered rich snippets in the SERP. Today it plays a bigger role: helping AI systems identify entities and cite your brand with confidence. It is one of the core pieces of AEO.
The most useful markup types in B2B
- Organization: logo, description, contacts, social profiles, your company as an entity.
- Article: editorial content with title, author, date and images, which reinforces E-E-A-T.
- Person: author profiles, important for authority and the Knowledge Graph.
- FAQ and HowTo: questions and steps, the format AI likes to extract for answers.
- VideoObject: video with a transcript, highly citable.
- Review and Product: relevant for anyone with rated offers or a catalog.
The point is not to mark up everything, it is to mark up what describes your entity and your content consistently.
The three formats
- JSON-LD: a separate code block in the
<head> or body. It is Google's recommended format and the easiest to maintain.
- Microdata: attributes (
itemscope, itemtype, itemprop) inside the HTML.
- RDFa: an HTML extension that embeds semantics in the tags.
In practice, for most sites, JSON-LD is the right choice: it stays isolated from the HTML and is simple to generate and audit.
Why this weighs more now
AI models build answers from entities and the relationships between them. A site with consistent Schema (organization, authors, articles, FAQ) gives the model a clear basis to associate your brand with a topic and to cite it. Without structured data, the model has to guess, and it guesses in your favor less often. A well-used sameAs and @id help link your entity to its recognized sources.
How SmartLinks works on this
Structured data is not a plugin you switch on and forget. It needs coherence across the organization, authors, articles and offer pages, and maintenance when the site changes. It is part of our SEO & AI Search work: building the entity layer that makes AI understand and cite your brand.
If your site lacks a coherent structured-data layer, you are making it harder for the very systems that should be citing you. See what is missing in the Diagnosis.
