Schema markup had a rough week. Google ended FAQ rich results. Four days later, Ahrefs published a report, finding that adding JSON-LD didn’t produce a clear citation lift across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, or ChatGPT.
These developments weaken two common pitches for schema markup: increased SERP visibility and potential AI citation gains. This article examines their implications and what the data indicates about schema’s future.
Google’s Visible Schema Rewards Have Been Narrowing For Years
Google has been pulling back visible Search rewards tied to specific structured data types since 2023. Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites, and HowTo rich results were limited to desktop and later deprecated.
In 2025, Google announced the retirement of several structured data features, including Course Info, Claim Review, and Estimated Salary. Book Actions was initially included but later carved out after Google removed its deprecation banner. Google called the remaining retirements “not commonly used in Search” and no longer providing value to users.
In 2026, Practice Problem structured data was deprecated. John Mueller noted on Reddit that “markup types come and go, but a precious few you should hold on to.”
The pattern is that visible structured data rewards have disappeared after becoming familiar SEO tactics. The markup itself stays valid, but the rich result doesn’t. Google doesn’t always describe these removals as responses to overuse, but the pattern offers less reason to treat any single markup type as a durable strategy.
These recent updates differ because the evidence for one proposed replacement value also weakened. The “GEO” advisory space claims schema boosts AI citations, and Ahrefs data tested part of that.
What The Ahrefs Report Found
Ahrefs tracked 1,885 web pages that added JSON-LD schema. Each page was matched against control pages that never added schema. Citation changes were measured across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT.
The results were flat. Google AI Mode showed +2.4%, ChatGPT showed +2.2%, and Google AI Overviews showed -4.6%.
The first two were too small to tell apart from random variation. The AI Overviews decline was statistically significant, but Ahrefs said it can’t confidently attribute that to schema.
Every page in the dataset already had more than 100 AI Overview citations before any schema was added. These pages were already being crawled and cited.
Ahrefs acknowledged that for pages not yet visible to AI, schema might still help with crawling, parsing, or indexing. But their data can’t confirm that.
Gianluca Fiorelli, a strategic SEO consultant, called the study “one of the more honest pieces of research to come out of the AI Search space in 2026.” But he argued the scope was narrower than the headline suggested. He compared it to “testing whether adding a label to a bottle already on the supermarket shelf makes customers pick it…
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