Does schema markup move AI citations?

Does adding JSON-LD make a page more likely to be cited by AI search systems?

Not in this study. Ahrefs measured pages that added JSON-LD and compared their citation changes with pages that did not add it. The study covered Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and ChatGPT.

The treatment pages were already visible to AI systems. Ahrefs says every page in the dataset had 100+ Google AI Overview citations in February 2025, before the schema was added. The result therefore describes already-cited pages, not pages that AI systems had never cited.¹

What did Ahrefs measure?

Ahrefs' study tracked the following treatment and control population:¹

Ahrefs reports the 4,000 control-page total separately from the three-control-URL selection. Those figures should not be multiplied or reconciled into a unique-control total that the study does not report.¹

What changed on each platform?

The study's matched difference-in-differences analysis reported these relative changes:¹

The numbers do not support a general claim that JSON-LD increases citations. They also do not prove that schema harms Google AI Overviews. Ahrefs says the small decline cannot be definitively attributed to schema because other changes may have occurred at the same time.¹

What does Google say LocalBusiness structured data does?

Google's LocalBusiness documentation describes structured data as a way to tell Google about business hours, different departments, and reviews when a site captures reviews about other businesses. The documentation does not say that LocalBusiness JSON-LD increases citations in AI search systems.²

Google's implementation guidance says to:

• use the required properties and follow its structured-data guidelines;
• validate the code with the Rich Results Test and fix critical errors;
• keep the page accessible to Google, without blocking it with robots.txt, noindex, or login requirements; and
• allow time for recrawling and reindexing.

Google also says that features consuming structured data are not guaranteed to appear in search results. If a page receives a structured-data manual action, Google says the structured data will be ignored even though the page can still appear in Google Search.²

For the narrower question of whether LocalBusiness schema affects local ranking, see Does LocalBusiness schema help local ranking. The Google Maps optimization guide and Google Business Profile cover the wider local-search and profile context.

What are the limits of the schema study?

Ahrefs identifies five important limits:

• Pages that added JSON-LD may also have changed their links, content, or other technical details. The study cannot fully separate those changes from schema.
• The analysis pooled schema types, including Article, FAQ, Product, HowTo, and Organization. It did not establish whether one type behaves differently from another.
• The post-treatment window was 30 days. A slower effect would require a longer observation period.
• The study tested JSON-LD, not Microdata or RDFa.
• The study measured schema in the page's HTML, not schema injected by JavaScript.¹

What should a business owner conclude?

Use LocalBusiness structured data when it accurately describes the business information on the page and follows Google's guidance. Validate it, keep the page accessible, and treat rich-result display as conditional. Do not add JSON-LD as a promise of AI citations. This study found no clear positive citation change among pages that were already visible to AI systems.