PondralSchema.org markup spent fifteen years as an SEO-only concern. Add Organization, add Product, add FAQ, watch for rich results. Most teams treated it as a checklist item. For a deeper guide on schema for AI specifically, see our schema markup for AI citation guide.
But schema is now a primary input to how AI models understand your business. The structured data you publish is, in many cases, the cleanest signal a model can find about who you are and what you sell.
Not all schema types are created equal in the AI era. Organization, Product, and FAQ are still essential. SoftwareApplication, Service, and HowTo have grown sharply in importance. WebPage, oddly, has become almost worthless. Models ignore it. For context on why your About page is now SEO infrastructure, the same entity-signal logic applies to your schema.
The biggest win we see, repeatedly, is brands adding sameAs links to their Organization schema, pointing at their Wikipedia, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and GitHub presences. Entity disambiguation is hard for models; sameAs makes it trivial. Track whether these improvements actually move your AI visibility score using Pondral's open scoring methodology.