Schema.org for AEO and GEO

Schema.org has hundreds of structured data types. Only a subset is worth maintaining for AEO and GEO. First, a calibration: Google says there is no special schema or AI text file required to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that structured data must match the visible content on the page. Treat schema as general hygiene that helps engines parse entities and relationships, not as a documented ranking lever for Google's AI features. The engine-by-engine picture is on the Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and Gemini profiles. The priority order below is a practical ordering for general structured-data hygiene:

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. Attributed content supports the E-E-A-T style trust signals that engines and quality raters look for.

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 states plainly that the content was created by a real entity with verifiable identity.

3. FAQPage. Fits genuine question-and-answer content. FAQPage with Question + Answer pairs makes the pairs explicit to parsers. Use it only where the page shows real questions and answers; it is not a documented way to earn AI Overview placement.

4. HowTo. Step-by-step content. Google's 2023 changes reduced its weight in search, and it is not a documented lever for AI Overviews; use it as descriptive markup for genuinely procedural pages.

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, consistent with Google's guidance that markup must match what users see: 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.