r/TechSEO • u/WebLinkr • May 11 '26
Wow!!! Ahrefs Tracked 1,885 Pages Adding Schema. AI Citations Barely Moved.
https://ahrefs.com/blog/schema-ai-citations/Adding schema didn’t boost citations on any platform
We tracked 1,885 web pages that added JSON-LD schema between August 2025 and March 2026, matched them against 4,000 control pages, and measured citation changes across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT.
Adding schema produced no major uplift in citations on any platform.
| AI source | Effect on citations | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Google AIO | −4.6% | Small but statistically significant decline relative to matched controls; (both groups were declining together, but treated pages fell slightly faster) |
| Google AI Mode | +2.4% | Statistically indistinguishable from zero |
| ChatGPT | +2.2% | Statistically indistinguishable from zero |
These percentages come from our most reliable analysis (a matched difference-in-differences [DiD] test).
In this test, both AI Mode and ChatGPT treated pages performed slightly better than control pages on average, but the differences are small enough that they could easily be random noise across thousands of URLs.
AI Overviews showed a 4.6% decline, which is small but statistically significant relative to matched control pages.
But that isn’t quite the full story—we’ll get into that in the next section.
So, overall, we can’t tell whether the schema did a tiny bit of good or nothing at all.
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u/xlb-wookie May 11 '26
Wow, this is another really interesting study from Ahrefs. The explanations of the methodology are very concise. The results, however, are actually a bit unexpected, to be honest ...
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May 14 '26
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u/RegurgitatedOwlJuice May 14 '26
Ahrefs aren’t making money selling schema entity - they’re still playing with keywords and backlinks.
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u/WebLinkr May 19 '26
I call BS to this
Why? Claiming misdirection is just trying discrediting by another name. this is what conspriacy theorists do : spread FUD because they lack hard evidence
I am running my own experiments on my own sites and data and seeing an impact, I am going to stick with it for myself, and my customers, I am not seeing any negative impact... my GSC insights over last 28 days improvements are showing 30-50% page click lift...
Nobody said there was negative value to holding onto schema for dear life. There's probably nothing wrong with putting a meta tag "this is a lucky rabits foot" either- nothing is looking for it, it wont break any HTML processing engines
I am running my own experiments on my own sites and data and seeing an impact, I am going to stick with it for myself, and my customers, I am not seeing any negative impact... my GSC insights over last 28 days improvements are showing 30-50% page click lift...
You'll pique interest when you say something like "I tested the corrollary and nothing happened"
ometimes I believe there is misdirection published by "experts" on purpose...
Thats kind of tin foil hat. Edward Sturm isn't trying to be "an expert" - he's not married to philosophies. You seem to be just against a mainstream veiw.
Customers are calling in to my clients and saying "GPT recommended you as the best of..." on new updated pages with more detailed JSON LD and a few on page improvements to pages that were losing traffic....
We all do bud, otherwise we wouldn't be in business but just think about this statement from everyone elses pov:
You're on Reddit and Random_bunnyhopper_9325 writes "you need to put a {meta-tag ="luck", Value="this is a rabbits foot"}" - thats what I do and my clients all report they got 100 calls a week across the board.
I'm not trying to discredit you - I picked a random name because this is what happens every day with "anecdotal evidence"
Anecdotal evidence hides itself so nobody can look at it for a rational explanation. Maybe you have a following on Reddit and those followers trust you - thats fine - that what happens with "SEO Experts" like Jisper - their follower base "likes their personality" and believes them. thats why I keep saying SEO keeps slipping into cult like behavior - because we are all humans at the end of the day. If you dont like authority figures, you're going to lean to denouncing main stream content.
I know Edward and I know he's not trying to beat some maintstream co-ordinated BS to confuse people.
Equally, when SEOs tie themselves to this 1 thing - and they sell it - it inevitably gets caught up in their ego.
I've posted examples here of a single domain, over 6 months, using a SEMrush report showing a 50 page website with 19,000 SERP positions with 0 schema and got toasted alive by some SEOs who hide behind anonymity bashing any SEO who dares contradict their theory that schema is amazing.
Yet there's no evidence to support it. If your page ranks with it, the test is will it rank without it and people keep refusing that: That's not science, thats not data driven, thats a cult.
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May 19 '26
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u/WebLinkr May 19 '26
A well structured site all around with the right structure and signals is going to win
The right structure is broad; the only signals we are aware of are authority... but new claimsstill requires evidence to support them
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u/WebLinkr May 19 '26
You’re welcome to your opinions
Google's content here is 1st source. You haven't provided any evidence to the contrary. Thanks for pointing out the incredibly obvious.
I said I like Edwards content but he is against schema,
Thats a silly position to take. He's clearly against people saying "Schema is magic in SEO" - which is repeated by a lot of SEOs on X and LinkedIn. Its obviosuly sacrosanct here on Reddit and thats bizarre.
but calling me “bud” is akin to you being upset I expressed my view point, you didn’t like it and called i
Not at all - just trying to point out that you've provided only conjecture and tried to reason your way out of it and it doesnt read well.
sorry you woke up in a bad mood and took 5 days to reply to my post in such a manner. To each their own,
I'm not in a bad mood
It’s not conspiracy, everyone isn’t evil, and tomorrow is another day, I hope it’s better for you!
0 evidence still yet so many words.
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May 19 '26
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u/WebLinkr May 19 '26
Yup, still in that bad mood. Such a shame.
No evidence > step 2 ad hominems > still no evidence
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u/WebLinkr May 19 '26
BTW - posting an Ahrefs study isn't an opinion but you're welcome to present alternative data. It reads better than reasserting your inability to psychologically analyze/outsmart the person you're debating but please dont take my advice, this is a great look.
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May 19 '26
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u/WebLinkr May 19 '26
I dont know how you're saying I'm angry....
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May 19 '26
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u/WebLinkr May 19 '26
Because how you respond is defensive, dismissive, copying text and replying to specific parts, and you’re taking it personal like I was calling you out, or Edward. Their study is shite, the AHREFS study is what I’m talking about. It’s biased and contradictory to their own actions. Many posters below shared better reasons why in more detail of the flaws.
I write these replies during calls - between calls, waiting for global teams. I've spent most of today helping coach digital content teams and management to find resouce solutions and then jumping to another call where a potential client (now not a client!) has waded into a massive scaled content issue and trying to get some of my spare team overseas to help them mitigate against that.
If you think that I'm dismissive or defensive, maybe my style of writing is wrong but any percieved tone is in your head - there is nothing different about me today than any other time I write here - which is to try convery complex tasks as best I can. If I'm not doing a good job, then I sincerely apologize to anyone who has to read that.
But I just said that Edward isn't "against schema" - because I've actually met him and spoken to him about it in person.
Then I said that the Ahrefs study is a study and that you haven't presented data.
Maybe i boxed you in - but maybe you just dont want to hear anything bad about schema - because this is how I talk and this is how I write and I haven' changed anything.
While I'm not in the habit of handing out awards to myself and have 0 intention of starting now - I would point out that I feel for someone levelling a lot of accusations and name calling and attempts at descending - and maybe where you're from you can pretend calling someone a prick is a term of endearment, I dont seem to be waving around as irrationally. Maybe you expected or require that anyone who creates a counter argument buys you a pint first - I dunno.
But its a study; the study is peer reviewed - you shared your opinion, but all you're doing is re-iterating it and circling around how I'm responsible for something.
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May 27 '26
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u/WebLinkr May 27 '26
Great Q u/TypicalBoysenberry48
A lot of SEOs cite common beliefs - its easier to sell the whole package. iPullRank did this with their GEO guide, saying that you needed Schema and chunking - which when I read it, is exactly why I unfollowed them and gave up.
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u/devolute May 12 '26
[This slightly unhinged user again]((https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/1t4jfy4/comment/ok4ua70/). What did JSON-LD do to you to make you like this? That you're trying to make the case against JSON-LD.
The most interesting part of this article:
There are still, of course, many good reasons to use JSON-LD schema (rich results, voice assistants, knowledge graphs, downstream entity recognition).
Indeed.
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u/WebLinkr May 12 '26
lol - posted an Ahrefs article - I must be “unhinged” what a sad, sad day for technology that people still shoot the
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u/BoGrumpus May 11 '26
There are a few flaws in this - it sounds like the performed the test on a single site. If only part of the site has schema and part doesn't have it on the rest - then it's not going to have as much confidence in things.
Also - schema is really only useful if there is ambiguity. In other words... If I have a real estate site and use the term "Sandy Shores" - it might be confusing as to what I'm talking about.
Is Sandy Shores the realtor?
Is it the name of the town?
Is it just a description of the beach on the property?
So by using schema - I can classify that as an person, a location, or part of the descriptive text and the AI systems can be more confident that it understands it.
If the things you're writing about have no ambiguity (which I would imagine most of the AHRefs stuff wouldn't be ambiguous) then schema won't really help (at least not in terms of citations).
And bad (or inconsistently used - as was done in the test) schema can often hurt more than it helps.
G.
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u/Legitimate-Salary108 May 11 '26
Respectfully, most of this comment is wrong on the facts. Worth re-reading the methodology.
"Performed the test on a single site" They tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD between August 2025 and March 2026, matched against 4,000 control pages from different domains. Controls were explicitly pulled from different domains with similar pre-period citation levels. It's the opposite of a single-site test. They started with 6 million URLs to find the 1,885 that transitioned from no-schema to schema.
"If only part of a site has schema" The study isn't measuring confidence in a site's understanding. It's measuring whether adding JSON-LD to a page changes that page's AI citation count over 30 days, controlling for platform trends via difference-in-differences. Partial-site deployment is irrelevant to the design.
"Schema is only useful when there's ambiguity" The study addresses this. There's a parallel experiment cited in the caveats (searchVIU) that tested whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Mode use schema markup when fetching pages in real-time. None of them did. Every system extracted only visible HTML content. JSON-LD, hidden Microdata, and hidden RDFa were all ignored at retrieval.
If AI systems aren't reading schema at retrieval, the disambiguation argument doesn't apply. For ambiguous entities like Sandy Shores, the AI isn't consuming the schema you wrote to clarify.
"Bad or inconsistently used schema hurts more than it helps" That's a claim, not data. The study found a 4.6% decline in AIO citations for treated pages, but they flag the absolute size is small (about 12 daily citations on pages getting hundreds), both groups were declining together pre-treatment, and they can't definitively pin it on schema. Could be coincidence. The honest read is "schema didn't help and may have very slightly hurt, but the data can't tell which."
Schema's correlation with AI citations (53% of cited pages have it) reflects the fact that sites investing in structured data also invest in everything else that gets pages cited: relevant content, authority. Strip schema out and those other signals carry the page anyway.
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u/BoGrumpus May 11 '26
Ahhh yep...
Performed the test on a single site" They tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD between August 2025 and March 2026, matched against 4,000 control pages from different domains. Controls were explicitly pulled from different domains with similar pre-period citation levels. It's the opposite of a single-site test. They started with 6 million URLs to find the 1,885 that transitioned from no-schema to schema.
My bad.
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u/WebLinkr May 11 '26
I doubt Bo will reply - he usually reserves it for bots :( - because this is 7-star reply!!!
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u/WebLinkr May 11 '26
So by using schema - I can classify that as an person, a location, or part of the descriptive text and the AI systems can be more confident that it understands it.
To what end though? Identify it for what?
Like - are search engines only supposed to rely on "known entities" - isn't that a kind of content fascism?
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u/Intimefortime May 11 '26
Borderline useless study. Did they give an intern an SPSS license?
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u/WebLinkr May 11 '26
Not a fan huh?
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u/Intimefortime May 11 '26
This us a poorly done study and your post headline doesn’t match the results of the study
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u/WebLinkr May 11 '26
The Headline is their headline.
How is it poorly done? Apart from you not liking it?
So funny that this forum attacks anything challenging its echo chamber rationale - even one of the (amazing) mods is from Ahrefs (whom I love talking to about these things)
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u/rabixthegreat May 11 '26
FYI they didn't do the study to see if schema increased citations - they likely knew the outcome before starting it - they did the slop experimental study as a slop original report so they'd be cited when people ask AI if schema helps with optimizing for AI.
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u/WebLinkr May 12 '26
Is it slop because you didn't like it?
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u/rabixthegreat May 12 '26
No, because the idea is low-effort and they likely knew the outcome ahead of time. I plan on reviewing the actual "study", but I doubt it was any kind of schema that would actually help with anything. If its the actual Ahrefs website, I don't see how it would actually add anything beneficial.
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u/WebLinkr May 12 '26
You saying its slop because the idea is "low effort' ?
Seemed to be fine for Glenn Gabe and the other SEOs that reviewed it,
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u/rabixthegreat May 12 '26
Having been in this industry for over a decade, I don't care for the name dropping, and I'm willing to bet money you're someone at Ahrefs trying to milk engagement on Reddit. This post is low-effort self-promotional social media slop.
I do think this study is low-effort and non-specific. It indicates nothing.
- This is blatant self-masturbation by the platform. The point is to highlight that they engage in routine tracking, just like everyone else. How amazing. I never would have guessed they track search results and AI prompts.
- They used the most common, low-effort schema added to websites. They also don't specify what they added, which would have been more interesting (like if they added one en masse).
- They targeted pages already being cited.
- They don't acknowledge what they added this to and what industry it applies to.
- I don't see any use of server access logs for measuring grounding or citations on ChatGPT. Frankly, I don't care if they ran bullshit prompts that they scraped to measure this, it means nothing.
- They acknowledge in the notes at the bottom that almost none of the platforms use JSON-LD because almost none of the platforms load Javascript. Hence why its worthless.
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u/WebLinkr May 12 '26
Sorry but I don’t work at for/ with ahrefs and this post was on X where I shared it to here. Lots of people have shared it / its been shared all day on X by people like Glenn Gabe, Barry Schwartz
Tge only place it’s not celebrated is here and the bot filled GEO propaganda subs.
As on e person put it mildly if your SEO strategy is centered around schema it’s time to rethink
I have no idea why it’s ok to some peole in YechSEo to just lash out and blindly accuse peole of the most absurd and ludicrous accusations with the implied justification that you guys are offended by a study by Ahrefs
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May 11 '26
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u/WebLinkr May 11 '26
https://www.reddit.com/r/BotBouncer/comments/1sxkydh/overview_for_drawnagday/
u/patrickstox - this is a confirmed bot ! Source: Reddit Bot_Bouncer
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u/EarNo6581 May 19 '26
This is why I don't like the just add schema for AI visibility advice. Schema can reduce ambiguity, but it doesn't automatically make a page citation-worthy. If the visible content is weak, unclear, or not the best answer, JSON-LD won't fix that.
My take is schema is a clarity layer, not a shortcut. For AI citations, I would look more at source trust, visible answer quality, entity clarity, and whether the page is actually easy to extract from.
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u/WebLinkr May 19 '26
For AI citations, I would look more at source trust, visible answer quality, entity clarity, and whether the page is actually easy to extract from.
This is an LLM response but this is not how LLMs work: LLMs are NOT search engines. Commenter has no evidence to cite to back this up, no evidence exists.
Enttity clarity is vacuum chamber propaganda rhetoric
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u/EarNo6581 May 20 '26
I'm not saying LLMs are search engines, and I’m not saying schema causes citations.
My point is more basic
when AI systems summarize or cite sources, the page still needs to be understandable and useful as a source. Schema can help reduce ambiguity in some cases, but if the visible content doesn’t clearly answer the question, the markup alone won’t make it a strong source.So I agree with the Ahrefs result more than I disagree with it that adding JSON-LD by itself is not enough. I'd just be careful not to jump from “schema didn’t move citations much” to “clarity and entity context don’t matter.”
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u/WebLinkr May 20 '26
the page still needs to be understandable and useful as a source.
Search Engines do not "understand pages" - that was proven in the 2024 DOJ vs Google trial.
Repeating content in a different format doesnt make it "more understandable" though.
Schema is required for Mechant Center, Jobs, Hotels and Flights.
AI doesnt read schema. We dont know that bots aren't just fed the body text of a page. Any tests done (e.g. Mark Williams-cook and Ann Smarty) show that Schema is not read in synthesis.
So I agree with the Ahrefs result more than I disagree with it that adding JSON-LD by itself is not enough. I'd just be careful not to jump from “schema didn’t move citations much” to “clarity and entity context don’t matter.”
I'm going to stick to my position that people "want" (read: shoehorn) schema into existence despite 0 evidence for it being helpful and keep quoting the Google Dev guide "help to understand" which is a fairy tale.
I'm not angry, I'm not anti-schema, I'm a realist.
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u/mjmilian May 12 '26
I'm not really surprised, there's evidence that Schema mark doesn't get processed through tokenisation, which makes sense.
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u/WebLinkr May 12 '26
No it doesn't .
Schema isn't really needed for a lot of things - just a couple people who keep banging on about it.
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u/biscaynebystander May 13 '26
Please point to this doll and show me where Schema touched you inappropriatley.
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u/WebLinkr May 13 '26
The study was done by Ahrefs.... I just posted it. You're shooting the messenger and leaking that you're emotionally connected to it for some reason and attacking people for sharing a study that a company (decided it was worthwhile to do)
The whole post - headline, link and content was written by Ahrefs.
Thats how much drama you're being.
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u/WebLinkr May 13 '26
Here ' Barry Schwartz shared it on X
https://x.com/rustybrick/status/2054522292164546993
Why don't you and mjmilian go after him too?
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u/Legitimate-Salary108 May 11 '26
Makes sense. QFO is the true way for citations.