Our newsletterMedia / blogSearch Engine Land, 23 Sep 2025
Schema quality, not just presence, may help a page appear in Google AI Overviews
Optimisation methods
- Reader Note:
- The claim is hedged to may help, and the hedge is doing real work: the test controlled what it could aside from schema quality, but gives neither its own size nor the size of the effect it found. Ahrefs went on to test the same idea on a much larger scale, adding schema to 1,885 pages and comparing them against 4,000 matched controls, and found no lift in AI citations. That is the bigger comparison of the two, and it points the other way.
- Evidence:
- Experimental
- Vendor interest:
- Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- Sample:
- Three single-page test sites built by the authors, each targeting one selected query with similar Ahrefs metrics; one site used strong schema, one poor schema, and one no schema.
Reader Note:
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample:Good for
Backing budget and pricing decisions in similar situations.
Not for
- Situations far from the one tested, without checking again.
- This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- The source never says how this number was measured.
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