Short answer
Structured data describes, in a format machines read well, what is already visible on your page: who you are, where you are, what you offer, who wrote an article and when. It helps a search engine disambiguate your entity. It does not force Google or ChatGPT to cite you, and Google says its AI features need no special markup. What does harm is inventing: ratings that do not exist, awards, false addresses or identifiers.
What makes sense
| Type | Where | What it describes | What not to invent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organization | Home page | Name, URL, logo, address, contact, official profiles | Ratings, awards, identifiers you do not have |
| Person | Author or team page | Name, role, relationship with the company | People who do not exist |
| Service or Product | Service or product pages | What it is, who offers it, price if public | Availability or fictitious reviews |
| Article | Blog articles | Title, author, publication and review dates | False dates to look recent |
| FAQPage | Pages with visible questions | The same questions and answers the page shows | Questions that are not on the page |
| BreadcrumbList | Inner pages | The real navigation path | Paths that do not exist |
Google documents Organization markup to help it understand and disambiguate the entity. That can be useful to an AI trying to work out whether “Smile Dental” and “The Smile Clinic” are the same company. It does not guarantee any particular appearance.
What is superstition
- A schema “for AI”. It does not exist. Google has said its AI features need no special markup; OpenAI does not document any. What they read is the HTML.
- AggregateRating without real reviews. Besides breaking the guidelines, if AI repeats it you are spreading a false figure under your own name.
- Marking a commercial page as Article to “look like content”.
- Filling sameAs with profiles you do not control or that do not exist.
- Thinking schema replaces text. If the page does not clearly say what you sell and to whom, the markup will not fix it.
How to do it properly in an afternoon
- Write in visible text what you want to mark up: exact name, one-sentence description, address and services, the same ones you use everywhere.
- Add Organization on the home page with that same data.
- Add Person on the author page if you publish signed articles.
- Add Article to your articles, with real authors and dates.
- Validate with Google’s Rich Results Test and the schema.org validator.
- Keep the markup identical to the text. If you change the price on the page, change it in the schema.