Schema markup won’t get you named by an AI assistant
Ask almost anyone how to be visible in AI answers and you will hear the same thing: add structured data. Mark up your business, your services, your prices, your reviews. Make the page machine-readable.
It is reasonable advice. It is also answering a question nobody asked.
What markup actually does
Structured data tells a machine what a page is about. This address is an address. This number is a price. This block is a review, and it has four stars.
Search engines have used it for years, and it works — it is why you see star ratings, opening hours and event dates directly in results. That part is real, and worth doing.
But notice what it does: it helps a machine understand a page it has already decided to look at.
That is not the step where an assistant decides whose name to say.
What the assistant is actually doing
When we ask “who runs diving trips here”, the assistant does not crawl the web looking for well-marked-up dive centres. It runs a search, reads a handful of pages it gets back, and writes an answer from what those pages say. This is visible from the outside: the developer interfaces return the answer together with the links it drew on, which is what we record.
So two things have to happen before markup could matter.
Your page has to be among the ones it reads. That depends on what the search returns — a different game, and mostly not about your markup.
Your name has to be on a page it reads. And here is the part that surprises people: that page is very often not yours.
Assistants lean on pages that list many businesses at once — directories, industry catalogues, booking platforms, operator lists published by public bodies. In our measurements those pages are 44% of everything cited, against 24% for businesses’ own sites. One page naming twenty companies is more useful to an assistant answering “who runs diving trips” than twenty separate company websites, each saying “we run diving trips”.
Markup on your own site does nothing about whether your name appears on someone else’s page.
The evidence, such as it is
This is not only reasoning. In our own measurements across seven of the eight markets we measure — 14,371 citations in assistants’ answers — businesses’ own websites account for 23.8% of the sources cited. Three quarters of what an answer is built from is somebody else’s page: catalogues, booking platforms, lists published by third parties. In no market were own sites the majority; the range runs from 14% to 32%.
None of this is a law of nature. Assistants change, and what is true this year may not hold next year. But right now, the advice “add markup and AI will find you” rests on an assumption that nobody has demonstrated.
Why the advice persists anyway
Three reasons, and none of them are dishonest.
It worked before. Markup genuinely helped in search, and the habit carried over.
It is something you can sell. Markup is a defined task with a clear deliverable. “Get listed in the directories your sector’s names come from” is slower, less tidy, and not always something an agency can do for you.
It feels like the right kind of answer. Machines read structured data, assistants are machines, therefore structured data. The chain is intuitive and wrong in the middle.
What to look at instead
Is your business on the pages that list businesses like you? Every sector has a few: an industry association’s directory, a marketplace, a licensing body’s published list, a specialist booking platform. That is where the names come from. Find out whether yours is there.
Is what those pages say about you current? Old listings outlive their usefulness quietly. An assistant reading a three-year-old list will hand a traveller a three-year-old phone number without hesitating.
Is your site actually reachable? Before optimising anything, check the dull things: does the page load, does it return errors, is there a stray “noindex” left over from a redesign, does the server treat automated visitors differently from browsers. A page that cannot be read is not a page that needs better markup.
And then, yes, markup. It is not useless — it is just not the lever people think it is. Do it after the things above, not instead of them.
What this does not say
That markup is worthless. Only that, among the things we measured, it is not what decides whether a name is said.
That being listed somewhere causes an assistant to name you. We measured where citations go, not what happens when a business changes something. That is a different study, and it needs the change dated.
That this holds for every market or every year. It is seven markets, measured daily, on one date. One of the eight is missing: its figures are under an agreement not to publish them yet.
The short version
Structured data helps a machine understand your page.
It does not decide whether an assistant says your name — because that decision is usually made on a page you do not own.
If you want to be named, the question is not “is my page well marked up”. It is “am I on the pages this assistant reads when someone asks for a business like mine”.
How everything above is counted — methodology.