Treat schema as housekeeping that aids parsing, not a growth hack: when an Ahrefs study from May 2026 tracked 1,885 pages that were already heavily cited (100+ AI Overview citations before any schema was added) against 4,000 control pages, citation changes stayed within statistical noise on ChatGPT (+2.2%) and Google AI Mode (+2.4%), and the one significant result went the other way: −4.6% on Google AI Overviews. That tests the marginal lift on pages already winning citations, not whether schema helps an uncited page break in. Types like Article, FAQPage, Organization, and DefinedTerm help engines disambiguate your pages and brand.
Clarity in the prose still does more than markup. Schema supports machine understanding; it does not substitute for being the clearest answer.