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 point is not to mark up everything, it is to mark up what describes your entity and your content consistently.
<head> or body. It is Google's recommended format and the easiest to maintain.itemscope, itemtype, itemprop) inside the HTML.In practice, for most sites, JSON-LD is the right choice: it stays isolated from the HTML and is simple to generate and audit.
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.
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.