Structured Data for AEO: The Schema Types That Get You Cited

Start with the schema that maps to your page type. A product page needs Product schema with name, price, availability, and aggregateRating. A blog post or guide needs Article with headline, author, and datePublished. A support or landing page with real questions needs FAQPage. A step-by-step tutorial needs HowTo. Don't stack unrelated types on one URL—one primary type per page, plus Organization and BreadcrumbList sitewide.

Organization schema is the one most small businesses skip and shouldn't. It tells engines who you are: legal name, logo, sameAs links to your social and Wikipedia profiles, and contact points. This is what feeds entity recognition—the difference between an AI citing "a Shopify app" and citing your brand by name. Put it in the site-wide layout or theme header so it loads on every page.

FAQPage is the highest-leverage type for citations because answer engines lift Q&A pairs almost verbatim. But it only works if the questions and answers are actually visible on the page—Google will flag hidden or markup-only FAQ content as spam. Keep answers to one or two sentences, phrase questions the way a real person would type them into ChatGPT or Google, and cap it at the 3-6 questions the page genuinely answers.

Write it as JSON-LD, not Microdata or RDFa. JSON-LD sits in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block, keeps your markup separate from your HTML, and is the format Google explicitly recommends. On Shopify, apps like Schema Plus or JSON-LD for SEO inject it automatically per template. On a custom site or Webflow, hand-write it or generate it from a template—either way it's a few lines you paste once per page type.

The rule that breaks most implementations: markup must match what a human sees. If your Product schema says the price is $29 but the page shows $49, or your aggregateRating claims 200 reviews you don't display, you risk a manual action and get nothing cited. Structured data describes the page—it doesn't add claims to it. Mark up what's already there, accurately.

Before you ship, validate. Paste the URL into Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org's validator to catch missing required fields and syntax errors. After it's live, watch the Enhancements reports in Google Search Console for warnings across your whole site. Fix errors first, warnings second—a broken required property means the schema is ignored entirely.

Structured data is table stakes for AEO, not a silver bullet. It makes your content legible to machines, but engines still cite pages that are clear, specific, and answer the question directly in the first paragraph. Get the answer-first writing right, then add schema to remove any ambiguity about who said it, what it costs, and when it was published. The two together are what get you quoted.