What Schema Actually Does (And What It Doesn’t)
And why it is still worth your time to get right.
If you’ve spent any time reading about AI search visibility in the past year, you’ve encountered schema markup described as one of the key levers photographers should be pulling. The claims range from cautious to breathless. Before I get into what I built on my own site and how, I want to be honest about what the evidence shows — because the honest version is more useful than the optimistic one, and it changes how you think about the work.
Schema markup is confirmed to help Google and Bing’s AI systems understand and represent your business more accurately. Both companies have said so directly. Google’s Ryan Levering described structured data as playing a “critical role” in grounding their generative AI systems. Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel stated explicitly that schema helps their LLMs understand content. A controlled experiment published by Search Engine Land found that only the page with well-implemented schema appeared in a Google AI Overview, while the page without it wasn’t surfaced at all.
What’s not confirmed: whether schema has any direct influence on ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. Those systems haven’t said. The likely mechanism is indirect — schema feeds Google and Bing’s knowledge graphs, which then feed retrieval pipelines that AI generators draw from. Your JSON-LD doesn’t have a direct line to ChatGPT. It works by making your business more legible to the systems that supply the AI, not by talking to the AI itself.
That distinction matters because it changes what you’re building. Schema isn’t a shortcut to AI recommendations. It’s infrastructure that makes everything else you’re doing more interpretable to the systems that matter.
One more honest thing before the implementation details: what others write about you matters more than what you write about yourself. Research analyzing AI brand citations found that roughly 85% come from third-party sources — press mentions, directory listings, venue blogs, review sites — not from the brand’s own content. Schema makes your first-party content more legible. No amount of it replaces the third-party signal you earn by doing visible work in the world.
With that context established, here’s what I built and why.
