Report: ChatGPT & Perplexity Treat Structured Data As Text On A Page

To fuel the debate in the SEO world of the topic of structured data and LLMs and AI engines, we are hearing that once again, AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity are not using structured data in any special way.

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Light Dark Use Device Settings Advertise Contact Us Home / SEO Copywriting / Report: ChatGPT & Perplexity Treat Structured Data As Text On A Page Report: ChatGPT & Perplexity Treat Structured Data As Text On A Page Feb 6, 2026 - 7:11 am 0 — by Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz / Executive Editor

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his expertise in the search marketing industry. He only provides consulting services to expert SEOs and also performs search marketing expert witness services. Barry graduated from the City University of New York and lives with his family in the NYC region. You can follow Barry on Twitter at @rustybrick or on LinkedIn and read his full bio over here.
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Mark Williams-Cook ran another test, here is his previous test, and posted the results on LinkedIn. He basically created a fake company named DUCKYEA t-shirts.

On the page about DUCKYEA t-shirts, he did not post the fake company's address. Instead, he put the address within made up JSON-LD schema markup. Then he waited and prompted both ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Both ChatGPT and Perplexity read the fake and made up schema to find the address. Since the schema was not valid, he figured that it was just being read by these AI engines like any other page of text on the web. "In my opinion, this test shows that the LLM agent is simply picking up whatever you are listing in the HTML. It does not matter if it is valid schema. If the system interprets the text as relevant to the prompt, it is included. It would therefore indicate that schema is *not* being used in the explicit sense it was designed for with those systems," he wrote.

Here is the graphic from Mark:

To be fair, OpenAI did say it gets shopping results data from structured data feeds. John Mueller from Google said it depends when it comes to schema helping with LLMs. Microsoft explained how schema helps Copilot.

But as Mark Williams-Cook said, "The takeaway: Schema, good. Repackaging the basics as some magical new GEO formula, bad."

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

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