The 5 Schema Types That Get You Cited by AI

Machines Don’t Read Paragraphs

Parse a homepage the way an AI system does, and the picture changes. It reads text, guesses at structure, and infers facts it cannot verify.

Schema markup removes the guessing. It states a fact directly, in a format a machine reads with certainty: this is your name, this is your logo, this is the exact question your FAQ page answers.

Active GEO scores this as Structured Data, one of the six dimensions we cover in a separate note. Five schema types cover almost everything a typical company site needs: Organization, Person, FAQPage, HowTo, and Article.

We Already Measured the Gap

Check 25 real restaurant sites and the gap gets specific fast. We ran that audit ourselves last week.

86%

Have some schema

18%

Have category-specific schema

Have Menu schema

Have FAQ schema

Most sites in that sample had some schema, usually generic Organization or LocalBusiness markup. Almost none had schema written for their specific category, and none had FAQ schema at all. Read the full audit for the details.

The five types below close that gap and cover the rest of a typical site besides.

Organization Schema

Add Organization schema to state your name, logo, and URL as facts, not as guesses pulled from a header and footer. Every AI system checking who you are starts here.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Active AI Advisors",
  "url": "https://activeaiadvisors.com",
  "logo": "https://activeaiadvisors.com/logo.png",
  "sameAs": ["https://www.linkedin.com/company/active-ai-advisors"]
}

First move: add Organization schema to your homepage. It is the schema type most sites should already have, and most still don’t.

Person Schema

Add Person schema to named team members who show up in bylines, About pages, or press mentions. It ties a name to a real title and a real employer, not just to a photo.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Paul Jamieson",
  "jobTitle": "Co-Founder & Principal",
  "worksFor": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Active AI Advisors" },
  "url": "https://activeaiadvisors.com/#about"
}

First move: add Person schema for your founders first, then any author with a byline on your Field Notes.

FAQPage Schema

Add FAQPage schema to any page that already answers common questions in prose. It is a rewrite of content you already wrote, not new work.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "mainEntity": [{
    "@type": "Question",
    "name": "What is GEO?",
    "acceptedAnswer": {
      "@type": "Answer",
      "text": "GEO is Generative Engine Optimization, the practice of making a site easy for an AI system to read, trust, and cite."
    }
  }]
}

First move: pick your five most common sales questions and mark them up as FAQPage schema before you write anything new.

HowTo Schema

Add HowTo schema to any page that walks through a sequence of steps. It gives an AI system an ordered structure it can quote one step at a time, instead of a wall of prose to summarize.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "HowTo",
  "name": "How to check robots.txt for AI crawlers",
  "step": [
    { "@type": "HowToStep", "text": "Open yoursite.com/robots.txt." },
    { "@type": "HowToStep", "text": "Look for a Disallow rule under a wildcard agent." },
    { "@type": "HowToStep", "text": "Add explicit Allow rules for GPTBot and ClaudeBot." }
  ]
}

First move: find the how-to guide you already published and mark up its existing steps. Most companies write the steps long before they add the schema.

Article Schema

Add Article schema to every long-form post, with a headline, author, and publish date. It lets an AI system attribute a claim to you by name, not just to your domain.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "The 5 Schema Types That Get You Cited by AI",
  "datePublished": "2026-08-20",
  "author": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Active AI Advisors" }
}

This page carries that exact schema. Open its page source and you will find it near the top, wired to this title and this date.

First move: add Article schema to your three most-read posts first, then backfill the rest as you go.

Validate Before You Ship

Broken markup counts as no markup. Run every schema block through Google’s Rich Results Test before it goes live. The check takes under a minute and catches most mistakes on the spot.

Re-check schema after any site migration or CMS change. A template swap can silently delete markup that took real time to add, and nothing on the page will look different to a human visitor.

Sources: Schema type definitions per schema.org. Gap statistics from our own audit of 25 Denver-metro restaurant sites, published as a separate Field Note.