Schema.org for AEO and GEO

Schema.org has hundreds of structured data types. Only a subset materially affects how AI engines understand and surface your content. The priority order, in rough descending importance for AEO/GEO:

1. Article + Author (Person). The foundation. Article schema declares this page is an article; Author with a Person entity (linked via @id to the canonical Person across your domain) ties content to a real human. AI engines weight Person-attributed content meaningfully higher than unattributed content for E-E-A-T signals.

2. Organization + Founder/Employee. The publisher-side complement to Author. Declares the entity behind the publication and ties it to people. The graph of Person → Organization → Article is what AI engines parse as the "this content was created by a real entity with verifiable identity" signal.

3. FAQPage. The most-extracted schema type for AEO. FAQPage with Question + Answer pairs gets pulled into featured snippets, AI Overviews, and voice-assistant responses at a higher rate than equivalent unstructured content. Critical for question-answering content patterns.

4. HowTo. Step-by-step content. Heavily extracted by AI Overviews and voice assistants for procedural queries. Lost a bit of weight after Google's 2023 changes but still a signal.

5. DefinedTerm + DefinedTermSet. Glossary entries. Highly LLM-friendly because they give engines unambiguous (term, definition) pairs. GEO Compass uses this aggressively for its own glossary; see the rendered JSON-LD on any glossary page.

6. BreadcrumbList. Site structure. Helps engines understand the hierarchy of your content for context.

7. ItemList + Product/Review. For comparison content and reviews. Increasingly extracted into AI answers for buyer-intent queries.

8. Speakable. Marks the parts of a page suitable for text-to-speech extraction by voice assistants. Less critical now than in 2018-2020 but still useful for voice-AEO.

Conversely, anti-patterns that suppress AEO/GEO ranking: contradictory schema (Article + Product on the same page with mismatched metadata), schema that lies about page content (claiming HowTo when the content isn't procedural), thin schema (FAQ with only one question, Review without a real review), and stuffed schema (every possible type declared without genuine relevance).

The practical rule: declare schema that accurately describes your page, focus on Article + Person + Organization as the foundation, add FAQ where you have real question-answer content, and skip types that don't accurately describe what's on the page.