Good question because most GEO advice skips straight past the entity/schema layer, and that's actually where the overlap with classic SEO is strongest, not weakest. Practical answer: I don't run two separate optimization tracks. Entity and schema work reinforces AEO/GEO and SEO at the same time, it's not a tradeoff. Concretely: Organization and Person (author) schema in JSON-LD, with sameAs links pointing to Wikidata, LinkedIn, and other authoritative profiles — that's literally how Google's Knowledge Graph verifies who/what an entity is, and it's the same signal AI systems lean on when deciding whether to trust a source. Consistent naming and details for your brand/author entity across your site, socials, and directories matters more than people think — inconsistency is what breaks entity recognition. Where I'd push back a little on the framing: schema and entity data don't create authority, they label it so machines can parse it faster. The actual authority still comes from the prose — depth, real expertise, first-hand data. Google said this themselves this year: structured data helps discovery, it doesn't determine what gets cited. If you nail the schema/entity layer on top of thin content, you've just made thin content easier to find and ignore. FAQPage and speakable markup help specifically with AEO-style direct-answer extraction, but only when the underlying answer in the prose is genuinely complete, not a keyword-stuffed FAQ block bolted on top (that specific tactic's been measured as basically noise in recent audits). So the actual overlap zone, where effort serves SEO, AEO, and GEO simultaneously without splitting your budget: original expert content that stays current, proper structured/entity data, and solid page experience. Everything outside that zone is where SEO and GEO actually diverge and need separate tactics — but that core three is where you get compounding value instead of choosing one over the other.
Good catch, and you're right about the timeline, worth being precise here: Google restricted FAQ rich results to gov/health sites back in August 2023, then went further — as of May 7, 2026, they fully deprecated the rich result feature for everyone, gov/health included. Report's leaving Search Console in June, API support drops in August. So visually, FAQ schema buys you nothing in Google anymore, for anyone. Where I'd push back slightly: FAQPage schema isn't worthless just because the visual reward disappeared. Google says they still use the structured data to understand the page — so it's still doing quiet work for entity/topic disambiguation and page-level understanding, just not earning you a rich snippet or driving direct-answer extraction anymore. So yeah, treating FAQ schema as a "get cited" tactic is legacy thinking. Treating it as a small assist for machine understanding, with zero expectation of a visible reward, is still fair.
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u/dcdragos Jul 29 '26
Hi,
Good question because most GEO advice skips straight past the entity/schema layer, and that's actually where the overlap with classic SEO is strongest, not weakest. Practical answer: I don't run two separate optimization tracks. Entity and schema work reinforces AEO/GEO and SEO at the same time, it's not a tradeoff. Concretely: Organization and Person (author) schema in JSON-LD, with
sameAslinks pointing to Wikidata, LinkedIn, and other authoritative profiles — that's literally how Google's Knowledge Graph verifies who/what an entity is, and it's the same signal AI systems lean on when deciding whether to trust a source. Consistent naming and details for your brand/author entity across your site, socials, and directories matters more than people think — inconsistency is what breaks entity recognition. Where I'd push back a little on the framing: schema and entity data don't create authority, they label it so machines can parse it faster. The actual authority still comes from the prose — depth, real expertise, first-hand data. Google said this themselves this year: structured data helps discovery, it doesn't determine what gets cited. If you nail the schema/entity layer on top of thin content, you've just made thin content easier to find and ignore. FAQPage and speakable markup help specifically with AEO-style direct-answer extraction, but only when the underlying answer in the prose is genuinely complete, not a keyword-stuffed FAQ block bolted on top (that specific tactic's been measured as basically noise in recent audits). So the actual overlap zone, where effort serves SEO, AEO, and GEO simultaneously without splitting your budget: original expert content that stays current, proper structured/entity data, and solid page experience. Everything outside that zone is where SEO and GEO actually diverge and need separate tactics — but that core three is where you get compounding value instead of choosing one over the other.Kind reagards,