Our newsletterVendor reportAhrefs, 11 May 2026
Pages cited by AI are about three times more likely to have JSON-LD schema than those that aren't cited
Optimisation methods
Prevalence of JSON-LD Schema on AI-Cited vs Non-Cited Pages
Prevalence of JSON-LD Schema on AI-Cited vs Non-Cited Pages| Page type | Has JSON-LD (%) | No JSON-LD (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Non-cited pages | 18.3% | 81.7% |
| Reference cited pages | 51.6% | 48.4% |
| Inline cited pages | 53.1% | 46.9% |
- Reader Note:
- From a scan of 6 million URLs; 53% of AI-cited pages carry JSON-LD. Ahrefs reads this as sites that add schema also investing in technical SEO, content and links, rather than as schema driving the citations — and its own follow-up test, where schema was added to pages that were already cited, found no lift at all. Which pages get cited is the AI's choice, so the two groups being compared here differ in more than their markup.
- Evidence:
- Observed behaviour
- Vendor interest:
- Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- Sample:
- Main study: 1,885 web pages that added JSON-LD schema between August 2025 and March 2026, matched to 4,000 control pages from different domains with similar pre-period citation levels that never added JSON-LD. All sampled pages already had 100+ AI Overview citations in February 2025.
Reader Note:
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample:Good for
Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.
Not for
- Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
- This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
Related cards
Idea
Go deeper on this topic
Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.
Trend