Why it matters.
Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD between August 2025 and March 2026 against about 4,000 matched controls and reported on 11 May 2026 that schema “produced no major uplift in citations on any platform”: +2.2% on ChatGPT and +2.4% on Google AI Mode, both indistinguishable from zero, and −4.6% on AI Overviews.
Google’s rules still apply: “Don’t mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page”, and structured data “must be a true representation of the page content”. Plugins often add an outdated founding date or an FAQ nobody can see.
The 10-minute self-check.
Paste your homepage into Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator, then compare:
- Organisation name, founding date, address and logo against your company facts page.
- sameAs links against your real, current profiles.
- Any FAQ markup against questions actually visible on the page.
Count the mismatches. More than zero is worth an afternoon.
Steps.
- Inventory schema by template and by source: plugin, theme or hand-written.
- Remove duplicate organisation blocks so one version speaks for the company.
- Make the organisation markup match your company facts page exactly.
- Keep FAQ markup only where the questions and answers are visible.
- Where you can, generate the markup from the same source as the visible text.
- Re-validate after every plugin or theme update.
Markup checks sit inside our technical SEO reviews.
What we saw on prolinkage.com.
How to measure it.
- Mismatches per template: quarterly.
- Errors: the enhancement reports in Search Console, monthly.
- Fact accuracy: whether the engines repeat your founding year and location correctly.
Sources.
- Ahrefs, Does schema markup increase AI citations?, 11 May 2026.
- Google Search Central, General structured data guidelines, read 8 November 2026.
- Prolinkage crawler and markup check of prolinkage.com, 6 November 2026.