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Light Dark Use Device Settings Advertise Contact Us Home / Google News / Google SEO / Study: Adding Schema Did Not Improve AI Citations On Google, ChatGPT & More Study: Adding Schema Did Not Improve AI Citations On Google, ChatGPT & More May 13, 2026 - 7:21 am 1 — by Barry SchwartzBarry 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. 38,398 Articles as barry.schwartz Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization
A new study from Ahrefs says that adding schema (structured data) does not and did not boost citations on any of the AI platforms including Google (AI Overviews or AI Mode), ChatGPT and others. "Adding schema produced no major uplift in citations on any platform," Ahrefs wrote.
The company 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. It found there was no statistically significant finding that it made any difference.
In fact, the data showed that AI Overviews there was a 4.6% decline, which is small but statistically significant relative to matched control pages. But with 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."
The study digs into this in a lot more detail but as you can imagine, this new study has sent some ripples through the GEO/SEO community.
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