Websites Needs Schema Markup in the Age of AI Search. Here are 3 examples of schema markup to help you understand what it is.
What Schema Markup Actually Does
Schema markup doesn’t change what visitors see on your website. Instead, it works behind the scenes to define elements like your business information, your reviews, FAQs, and your products.
When this structure is in place in the code, AI is able understand context of the information. Without the backend structure, AI has to guess.
Geeks for Geeks puts it simply:
“Structured data refers to data that is organized in a predefined format, making it easily readable and understandable by both humans and machines. This is achieved through a well-defined schema or data model, where data is stored in an orderly way such as rows and columns.”
If AI tools better understand your content, they are more likely to use it.
3 Examples of Schema Done Correctly
Here are real examples of schema implemented well, along with how they differ from similar pages without schema.
Recipe Schema Example – Mary’s Turkeys
Correct schema example:
Mary’s Honey Maple Turkey Glaze recipe uses proper Recipe schema, which clearly identifies:- ingredients
- cook time
- nutrition
- instructions
- tool list
Why this matters:
A similar recipe on a smaller food blog without schema turns into a guessing game for search engines. AI sees a list of ingredients and paragraphs of text, but it cannot reliably determine which parts are instructions, cook times, or yield. As a result, AI is less likely to pull that content into a featured snippet or AI-generated cooking guide.FAQ Schema Example – Jemully’s FAQ Page
Correct schema example:
Jemully’s own help pages demonstrate textbook FAQPage schema, signaling:- the question
- the answer
- additional supporting links
Why this matters:
Compare this to a typical FAQ page on a small business site—questions written as headings, answers written in paragraphs, but no underlying schema. AI can read the words but cannot tag or extract them cleanly. Proper schema makes FAQs eligible for rich results and improves how AI tools summarize the page.Product Schema Example – Home Depot
Correct schema example:
Home Depot uses extensive Product schema on nearly all product pages. Both the front end view for the user and the backend code for AI provide the searcher with the necessary product information.What you’ll find in the page source:- Product name & description
- Price
- Brand
- Ratings & reviews
- Availability
- Item identifiers
Why this matters:
It’s a real, functioning example of optimized product schema used by a major retailer. And, you have to admit that it is pretty user friendly because all of the information you might want is organized and laid out for you to quickly find.
One More Note: Product Schema vs. No Product Schema
If you’d like to contrast correct product schema with a non-schema example, you may look at two similar product pages. Both pages show an outdoor seat cushion on a page with product information.
From a user’s perspective, both the Home Depot outdoor cushion page and the Ace Hardware outdoor cushion page look about the same. They display most of the information you may want if you are interested in buying the product. Both look complete to a shopper.
But to AI that scans the backend code, you have no way of knowing if there is a schema:
- price
- brand
- availability
- sku
- aggregateRating
This page is visually informative yet could be “invisible” to AI-rich results.
How does comparison help you?
It shows that a page can look complete to the public eye but may lack the markup AI needs to understand it.
Schema markup reduces ambiguity. It clearly transforms your content from “helpful information” into trusted data that AI can reliably use.
Neil Patel summarizes it well:
“Search engines depend on structured data to better understand your content and rank it appropriately.”
In other words, schema (what Neil is calling “structured data”) isn’t optional anymore. It is part of the foundation of SEO for AI. Your website may already have strong content—but if the structure behind that content isn’t modernized, AI tools won’t know what to do with it. Schema markup is one of the smartest, highest-impact ways to make your website more visible, more trusted, and more competitive in an AI-driven search environment.
If you’d like Jemully to review your website and implement proper schema markup, our team is here to help you become AI-ready from the ground up.
About the Author
Kit Mullins, co-owner of Jemully Media, LLC, has been a leader in digital marketing for more than twenty years. A writer, designer, and developer, Kit enjoys travel, photography, and Bible study. With six kids and fifteen grandkids, she has no choice but to find ways to be creative.
