Insights · Field note · Growth and AI visibility
Schema that retrieval systems actually use
Of the hundreds of schema.org types, a handful matter for being identified, attributed and cited. The rest is decoration.
Retrieval systems use structured data to answer three questions: who published this page, who wrote it, and what kind of thing is it. Organization schema with consistent facts and sameAs answers the first. Person schema on author profiles, with author markup on signed pages, answers the second. Article, Service, FAQPage, DefinedTerm, HowTo and BreadcrumbList answer the third by stating what the page is and how it is structured. Markup that does not serve one of those three questions rarely changes anything.
In detail
What the evidence shows.
Who published it
An Organization block on every page, identical everywhere, generated from one source: name, legalName, address, foundingDate, founder, logo, knowsAbout and sameAs to official profiles. This is what lets an engine merge the page with its representation of the organization. Inconsistent Organization blocks across a site are worse than none.
Who wrote it
A Person block on each author’s profile page with jobTitle, worksFor, knowsAbout and sameAs, and author and reviewer properties on each signed page pointing to that profile. Engines weigh verifiable authorship heavily; this is the markup that makes verification possible.
What the page is
Article for notes and comparisons, with headline, dates, author, publisher and citations. Service with audience for service, capability and industry pages. FAQPage for pages with visible question-and-answer pairs. DefinedTerm within a DefinedTermSet for glossary entries. HowTo with steps for checklists. BreadcrumbList for position in the site. Each tells the engine how to read and attribute the page.
Rules that keep it honest
Markup must mirror visible content; a FAQPage with questions that are not on the page is misleading. Dates must be real: dateModified changes when the page does. Generate markup from the build so page and schema cannot disagree, and validate every block on every release. See entity and schema engineering and the glossary entry for schema markup.
Sources
Primary references.
By David Selakovic · Published 2026-10-16 · Revised 2026-10-16 · Reviewed every 180 days