AI-ready schema: Feeding Google’s answer engines with structured data
Schema has evolved from simple SERP enhancements to a complex system supporting AI-driven answer engines, with the number of schema types growing from under 300 in 2011 to 799 today.
Beyond schema markup, AI-ready optimization now requires structured content—concise, clearly organized information that LLMs can tokenize and interpret efficiently.
Effective AI-ready SEO prioritizes populated product variants, eliminates content fluff, and uses tools like tokenizers to understand how AI systems ingest your pages.
Measurement remains challenging due to rapidly changing algorithms, but tracking AI Overview citations and using natural language search tools can provide insights into how AI systems perceive your content.
The SEO landscape is undergoing fundamental transformation, with implications for hiring, content strategy, and long-term visibility across multiple AI platforms.
[Music] because maybe it will be and it'll be the new Google, but maybe it's the MySpace and maybe there's a Facebook out there that you know is just coming up. Maybe Claude is that underdog right now that's just going to leak through through some technology that just on the mass market helps everyone. Hello and welcome to SE Rankings Do Follow podcast. Here we bring you in-depth conversations with SEO, digital marketing and it and search experts diving deep into the latest trends and strategies to help you stay ahead. Be sure to subscribe to keep up with everything happening in search. Today we're discussing an exciting topic, AI ready schema feeding Google's answer engines with structured data. We're joined by Alex Moss, a UK-based technical SEO consultant and WordPress developer with 20 plus years in search. He serves as principal SEO at Yoast, the WordPress plug-in running for more than 13 million sites. And he is the co-founder of the boutique agency Fire Cask. Known for his deep work with structured data, site performance and EAT, Alex writes for search engine journal and skiit of conferences worldwide, translating code level fixes
into measurable organic growth. And today he'll be sharing valuable insights with us on this evolving area of SEO. Welcome to the DFollow podcast, Alex. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. What an introduction as well. It makes me also realize my age a little bit. >> I tried. Yeah. But yeah, you definitely have a have a lot behind you and hopefully I'll still a long road ahead. If you don't mind, I just want to jump right in and ask you to tell us about the ins and outs of your journey into into traditional SEO. Then how you made your way into structured data and when did AI come into the picture for you? >> Well, traditional SEO, I mean, for me, I think it's like anyone maybe over the age of 35, we fell into it as a diversion from something else. And it's something I kind of just understood. But if I go back further, I didn't realize I was doing SEO when I was a teenager. I used to build websites like I had a South Park fan website and I was doing black hat SEO without realizing that that was what I was doing. So I would say I would actually have it as an aggregator site. So I collected content from other websites. Like one site had pictures, another site had scripts and another site had videos and I would just
pull them all together and I started ranking for it. And then I uh did a bit of ad um fraud I guess you could call it. I was doing against the toos where I did a one pixel by one pixel I frame on the site on every single page and at the time you got money per impression. So that really worked. And then I found out I could like rank for things that had no relevance at all to South Park. Fake Nike trainers if I just added content into the site if I hid it behind a white background with white tech. All of those little nifty things that I wasn't doing it professionally. I was just a kid, you know, mcking around with HTML. And then it turns out that I was understanding this first foundations of traditional SEO. It kind of went from there. Fell into a web design job after doing freelance work through university and then that just got me into SEO. And then fast forward to when structured data happened. That was around few years after I got into WordPress which was about 2009. Structured data I started getting really interested in cuz you can have layers of information based on what you're trying to present on a page. And I thought that was really cool. And I
remember I um developed a plug-in for um sharing on Facebook and Twitter, social structured data. I did a few talks on it back in 2013. I remember doing one at Brighton. And that ended up um getting sucked into Yoast as well. Like Yoast created his own version of it as an addition to Yoast SEO. And obviously I kind of went I'm not I'm not competing with that guy or that company. So uh kind of just left it alone and then he continued it. But we worked together during that time. And then fast forward to being at Yoast and now I get involved with the product development of what gets output in terms of structured data for Yoast, which is again something someone who I work with now 12 years ago on structured data. So it's kind of serendipitous circle that's gone around but it's it's always been around. It's always been an interest of mine to understand entities and how they all relate and things like the knowledge graph which really spread how the internet and crawlers interpret things and now LLMs right >> fantastic journey that you sort of fell
into. Yeah, it took you to places and I would wanted to focus a bit more on the topic of today's uh today's discussion about structured data. So how has it evolved over the years specifically and what role does it playing right now? >> Well at the beginning it was just complementing SERs wasn't it? It was just um I think the first ones like recipe and star ratings on reviews and that really help you could see how that helped people understand a bit more context of what was going to be inside the page before they clicked into it. And then they brought more stuff into the SER and then obviously Google may have monetized off the fact that we were giving them that structured data and then brought it into ads made it more compelling. But actually over the time you know from 2011 to 2020 went from just under 300 types of schema to nearly 800 is actually 790 in 2020. And now if we fast forward from 2020 to today we've got well the last time I checked it was 806 when I did my talk in at the Zyagra bestio summit but since then which was only 6 weeks ago they've removed seven
types. So now we're now back to 799. In 10 years, it's nearly tripled. And in the next five years, only nine types have been entered. So, it's kind of peaked. But does that mean it's stopping or does that mean it's kind of gone to the ceiling where it needs to be and maybe that plateau is actually acceptable? That's been really cool. But if you think of the evolution, it's not just gone from one layer of structured data that then entities and knowledge graph made relationships between each other and then that made everything go just well beyond schema into all types of ways in which crawlers and now LLMs get to interpret different types of content. But obviously now with LLMs, you go beyond schema and structured data into structured content and formatting which um you know has now widened the scope of what we need to be looking at and monitoring over time. And of course you you've got LLM.txt you know that didn't exist about a year ago. It's less than a year old and whilst it's not like the de facto like robots.txt, this is
now an added element on how an LLM ingests your site and your content within the site. >> Yeah. gives us us enough reason to be frustrated and to always just think if we're having have everything under control. I wanted to get your understanding of uh cuz I realize every everybody wants to use AI to their advantage, wants to cut corners, wants to figure out how to how to yeah speed up their processes because everybody's going to be doing it and you're just going to be left behind and gone if you're not if you're not using AI just to get a lot of stuff done quickly. So I wanted to get your thoughts on what you think AI ready schema or AI already structured data is. What do these words mean to you? Well, AI ready to me is is it optimized to to that way and therefore can it be um be investigated and monitored and reported on but if we say AI ready schema maybe that's like too we're not being broad enough and in the past we didn't need to be broad enough but now we need to think of beyond structured data which you know provides meaning and that's fine but now you need structured content and the way in which that content flows and is and
is presented and it has to be concise has to be structured now we have to think a little bit more weirdly as technical SEOs on how content's being output, which I mean in the in my previous experience have been a little bit split out. You know, you would do keyword research, you would then give that to a creative and content team and then they would do what they needed to do to produce that content. And beyond, you know, headings and you know, and bridge snippets like FAQ snippets and stuff like that, it was kind of hard to do that. Um, and then over time, solutions like Yoast in WordPress and Shopify help with outputting the right schema in the right way. and more importantly being up to date because it's got more complex. Whilst the types haven't increased so much, Google support for existing types has increased. So we can use products and product variant. Products been around for ages, but product variants haven't been really supported in the way in which I would have wanted it to be until the last year or two. Really actually using that to experiment and investigate things. That's maybe using Claude or ChatgPT or one of those LLM platforms to
see how it actually interprets it. But I guess that's the way you're prompting to actually investigate those things. So as an SEO, you would now I would say have to have a library of prompts per client to understand things that you do as your job. And one of these things is asking it about is it the right type of scheme? Is the schema there and interpreting it beyond just a page and that's that's just um going on diagnosis. But AI ready schema and AI ready structure in general should be the old school things that we've been doing all along but thinking about it with a new technology in mind that's receiving it sort of is a bit easier to hear that cuz we're just doing what we did before but just adding something not just replacing that that's sort of yeah hope that hopefully that comes down our listeners I wanted to have a bit more focus on the stuff beyond markup so like the writing styles the heading hierarchy the lists other on page formatting elements, how do they influence the AI's understanding? Because you said like structured content, not just structured data. How do they influence both the AI's
understanding and just the overall visibility of a content piece? The native way that we've been doing, crawlers have been crawling sites. Now, LLMs don't crawl sites. They ingest content within sites in a different way to crawlers. So, now all of a sudden, structured content is more important because an LLM is ingesting it rather than just reading data. And whilst LLMs can read schema that's optional but content is not optional in general and the structure of which needs to be concise and now that's maybe something to think about a bit more and like elements include the order of the information the hierarchy of concepts the relationship between those concepts I'm talking about the same stuff that we've been doing kind of as an SEO all that time is the content there and there's internal linking and um context all there but we need to be a bit more concise. I usually go with one of those examples of, you know, one of those companies who are trying to be futuristic and you go to the about page and I'm reading four sentences in and I still don't quite know what you do,
right? Because you're trying to be clever with the text and trying to Right. LLMs don't care about any of that. They just want get to the point. Get what do you do? And be clear and concise and honest and transparent because LLMs don't care about content marketing fluff around what what the actual point and the intent of it is. So make all of that fluff a bit more redundant and then you'll find you'll have less but better quality content and then you'll be able to hopefully extend on that as you go on because it's not just about JSON LD for example. It can't just take it like a crawler can read that it's very nice and it's interpreted in that way but now LLM's contextualize and ingest that content and they do it in a tokenized form. So what sometimes I like to do is chat GPT have a free tokenized tool which I'm sure you can share in in this podcast. them and you can just paste in content and it tells you exactly how many tokens have been sent and it highlights areas of the content of which uses more or less tokens so you can understand the relationship and context and how complex
the LLM will have to work to interpret and ingest that content. So optimiz token optimization I guess is partly it but it gets to it gets to help you understand exactly what the LM sees when it ingests that content. Even besides structured data, we've had a conversation with among our content team. But what is should a blog look like nowadays? Are we still writing for people? Is somebody gonna actually open and read the intro and go to the outro? So, right now, we made a decision sort of yesterday to cut the length of all of our content pieces by maybe two or three times and mostly write for AIS uh cuz everything is going to be pulled out from there. We actually did consider having like a TLDDR but for like people or for search engines. So have an article but then condense it or maybe hide it from people and have something more vast available to search engines. And we're still trying to figure that out. But yeah, I think we're not going to go and have waste more of our resources on creating even more pieces of content, but we're just going to focus on having serving those snippets,
specific answers. So yeah, hopefully that will work. Yeah, we'll see. We just had um understanding that we added key takeaways to our blog post like a year ago and since we added that our engagement read time the average read time was a minute and 10 seconds. So people just log in, open up, they look at the key takeaways and boom they they go away. So at the same time we sort of satisfy their their demand but at the same time they're not sticking around with us for that long to build a relationship to read into the whole thing. So it's a very tricky situation. >> Yes, it is. And I guess it depends on what you want the summary to do. Do you want that knowledge to be solved? And if you do, then yes, either a human will just know what that summary is and go, I don't need to read anymore. But I guess it's part of our job now to in those TLDDRs or key takeaways or whatever you want to call them, like maybe entice or give incentive for further reading. And from a big content point of view, we now have to think, well, we should just be writing things that AI can't just answer, right? And that's quite a hard
conundrum to be in because you want to provide information, but then if you provide solved knowledge, then the LLM will appropriate it. Don't want to say steal because we're the open web and we're giving the information away and it's just being appropriated in a different way and owned so that they don't click you. And now we're in the zero click issue that we have. And now you have to think, well, how do you remove that zeroclick issue? How do you make that click happen? And I guess that's just like in a marketing way of just giving someone something to wet their appetite that might require more investigation in order to come to that your site, you know, which is going to be harder and harder as things go because there's going to be an again a big debate of what is going to happen with the open web. We've got people like Cloudflare, for example, who are now taking on AI bots in general by by taking by blocking them from crawling all of these sites, which I get the point. and you kind of want to own the content. But by doing that, you are removing any visibility to the open web,
which is again part of what our job's been for a generation. So what does what happens there? That's another you think AI in general is bad. That the what it does to the internet and how people intake information. I don't think we've been thinking enough of what that's going to be like in the next 5 years. And what happens if like websites die off? Does anyone like I'm sure people think about it, but what what if they do in the next 5 to 10 years and we can't predict all of what's going to happen next or what AI will direct us to do cuz it may start telling us the best way on which to, you know, output content and data for everyone's benefit. And I hope it figures out a way to do it so we all win. >> I'm a proponent of the idea that, you know, we still have bookstores, we have people buy vinyls. So, I'm hoping that there's still going to be maybe like a camp of people that are AI free and you're just going to go to them because you just know for sure that that was all by people and you just love the idea that it wasn't just some faceless entity that you're excited about talking to, you know?
>> Yes. Yes. And and it's again the unsolved knowledge aspect and even take away AI from this. I saw a bit of uh Stephen Bartlett's um diary of a CEO interview with the godfather of AI and his first question was like what's you're the godfather of AI what's like the what's the prospect for people's careers in the future and what's that going to do to the job that was question number one and his answer immediately was learn how to be a plumber and that scared me because yeah so we're going back to basics like having a coup against digital and online where we've been trained now for 30 years that technology and digital is the future and maybe from a human's point of view it is in some aspects but maybe not in others again it's that risk and opportunity what to do and I don't know how to be a plumber so I'm hoping again that there's a solution for everyone in the long term which I'm sure there's always going to be as long as someone wants to discover something people like ourselves are going to facilitate that
>> all right I wanted to sort of go back and ask you to paint us a picture of a situation where like a real world world example where an AI sort of optimized structured data actually fed Google's responses and its answer engines well the new ones the AI if if you could um sort of accompany that with a measurable outcome like data something that helps us understand how you got there and how you understood that that is a good result I really appreciate that >> yeah yeah well there's not many but one thing that springs to mind is in AI overviews it gives you extracts from text to compile it and synthesize the answer. Now when it does that it uses part of that content. So again if I don't say structured data but I say structured content um Google has been able to with the fan out queries find this page look at the whole content and they'll go all right well based on the chat based on the query if you want to just call it a query for a sec I'll take this part of the content and I'll bring it into the AIO and then I'll serve it there and then when it's cited on the
right hand side this is what I'm seeing at the moment it gives you the source link you go in the source link and it doesn't just take you to the top it takes you to the area that is contextual to the AIO that it gave you. Now it has this like hashtag highlight in the if you look at this and you go to the URL you can see that now you can extract that out and you can use that and say G4 or tag manager set that up and that's something that you can monitor over time and then again it's it's only on it's not super big at the moment but it's going to increase as time goes on and this will be one of those things to monitor is how much um are people coming to which pages where certain elements are highlighted and then after a bit of data has been collected hopefully one can find a pattern in that and then either use it to their advantage or find a weak area in another part of the site or business and then take that and apply it into there. But yeah, there are other tools out there of course but that from a real world example from a searcher that's the best way I'm thinking at the moment that you see it. I wanted to mention that S ranking has an it's
rolling out an AI search toolkit and in that search toolkit we have the opportunity to track and research AIO results as well as Chad GPT and the thing that I wanted to add is that if sometimes like people will ask a query from Chad GPT where there's a brand as a result but they don't click on it and the the way that we can sort of keep track of that data is by analyzing our server logs our own server logs just to see if Chad GPT visited our pages so that is something that we're trying to fill fill in the gray zone And exactly all these points of touch that that sort of help us connect with these these AI powered search engines. >> That's kind of not easy for us to interpret, but it's much easier than other things because you're getting a URL and you're getting a query back in return, which is kind of similar to search console, for example. And us as our SEO brains should be able to relate to that quite easily because we've been doing that for a long time anyway. Um, and it's very good way of of monitoring that stuff. um which is really and and maybe activate or deactivate something. Maybe you're finding that G is accessing this page loads and loads of times and
actually they're getting the solved knowledge. Let's remove some of that solved knowledge to either let it and see what happens. Will it become less visible or will it still be cited but now it can't take everything that it know or knew once before unless it's caching that data which it isn't and then it's providing it with less content. What's what happens as a result? Does your site or your page have less visibility in AIO or does it have better ways of having someone come into the site because of that more limited content production that you do? And that's going to be another quandry of what to do. Do you uh how much how much content do you provide? Because again, we've been trained to provide as much as possible to attract people to come in to know more. >> Yeah, we're going to be doing a lot of researches this year and publishing a lot of things. This is just to cuz everybody's interested in understanding how it works, how how these uh AI outputs, sourced resource like where does the information come from? Can we control this in any way or is it always going to be up to just AI and always going to go against us? One thing that I wanted to ask you is there anything that
uh that sort of gets more weight, more focus, more attention when when you optimize structured data for for AI search engines? Is everything um have the same weight importance or is there something that you know for sure it gets gets bigger praise from Google? >> I wouldn't say anything's prioritized maybe, but if something isn't populated, it's not going to be found. My outputs always be populate as much as you can. Don't prioritize anything. And it's like schema for example isn't less important, but it's also not more important as it was before AI overviews existed. It's just keep doing what you're doing, but make sure it's all populated and try and do as much as possible where it can be done. Again, product variants, right? If you've got if you've got shoes in seven different sizes, then that's seven different product variants. And if you're in an LLM, which now knows your shoe size and you aren't specific to it, then maybe it might not find you because it just sees that you own a shoe, but you as a searcher may be very specific
to find a size seven. And you can even again get that without LLMs. I've been on sites where you tick your size and then all of these shoes that you wanted before just disappear because it's not in your size. And whilst that's annoying, it really refineses the process and stops even more frustration because then I'm now no longer clicking into 10 different shoes, none of which are going to be in my size. So populate as much as possible. Don't prioritize anything particularly, but yeah, I would say maybe if anything, just prioritize anything that you would as a business like your cornerstone content, your really important products. Is there anything that you notice people doing wrong often? Just like a huge mistake or just a minor mistake that sort of has huge repercussions, anything that sort of that you've noticed over the years, people getting wrong with structured data, >> experimentation beyond what's there. So, I know that like the perfectionist in me would love a hugely complex entity structured data on my website, but there's only so far I should be going, right? First of all, does the internet
need to know that much granular detail about me? But on the other hand, like does it care? Like, does it care about all of my skills? But do I need to attract that just for Google's benefit when they're only now supporting seven less than they were 6 weeks ago? It's one of those don't make mistakes, but don't don't go too far heavy. That's why we've not in Yoast necessarily built a really easy UX to let you do whatever schema you want. We've got the schema API. So if you know what you're doing, you'll be able to do it. But what we don't want people to do is not know enough about schema and think that they can just put 200 different properties on there and think that that's oh well if 200 something's going to pick one of those things. That's not necessarily true. That to me is spam and a waste of bites on source code and therefore a waste in the internet. It's like pollution in a way. Just again, if you're concise and you just need to do what what's relevant and output that don't try and abuse the system, you know, because now LLMs, they they're
going to know what you're trying to gain much quicker than humans. If you think about Google core updates, the kind of over the years like Panda Penguin, they've been reactionary, haven't they, to bad players in the SEO world and super black hats who've been trying to abuse successfully holes in the algorithm, and they've just been filling holes all this time. LLMs that no regulation, nothing, no teamwork, it'll just close that hole and therefore black hat I think's going to become redundant as time goes on. Even link building, right? All of a sudden unlin branded mentions are now a positive sign where black hats have hated that all that time. And now I go back when from an agency point of view, I've always said unbranded mentions are good anyway. Like not from an AI signal. This was like 10 years ago. Like it's still good to have those things. It's word of mouth just like anything. And yes, in a perfect world, you would have either a branded anchor text or unbranded anchor text, no m depending on what you're up to. But now, I'm now happy that we got those things cuz they're eight years old and
they're still there. And now LLM will consider that as aged authority, which now some agent agencies might be going, crap, I've been doing it one way all this time to try and game an algorithm where now it's gone beyond anything I can control. and history in content might be really important now all of a sudden and it'll serve as even more important. It's like a library, right? All of that stuff is just in a massive database can still be referenced no matter whether it's linked to another book. I I have a a very big question. I I get that it's it might be too difficult to answer, but from a technical standpoint, how does structured data interact with Google's AI systems under the hood? If you can comment on that in any way, I would I would be happy. I would say any answer I'd be guessing because like I've been saying in the past few months on different things the next two to three years are going to be is when the dust is going to settle but it's the dust has not settled yet in terms of this ecosystem and it's not settling anytime
soon and in fact I think it's going to get more dusty as the next year ahead goes which also is really annoying because up until now we've had great yearon-year data and all the things that I've been saying now in a year may not be as important or may even be really important or have changed in a way that you can't measure on it anymore. So, for the next 3 years, SEOs out there won't be able to do proper year-on-year data because of well, it's been it's been completely changing. It isn't just an update to an algorithm that's changed 10% of sites. This is something that's touching every single vertical in every single industry, which is very interesting to study around, right, as part of our job >> cuz most of my friends don't even know like what's going on, right? And whilst we can say we can't guess, we kind of have some inherent knowledge as to what's happening around us and the way it's going. But again, in 3 years, I don't think I could predict too much that might actually stick, right? I don't think many people can. >> Yeah, it's interesting to attend different team meetings and see how different departments sort of react to
this. Like the analytics team talks about one thing, the content team talks about another thing, the video production team is all about V3 and keeping that conversation going. So yeah, it's it's extremely overwhelming and it can be stressful and like there's no way of knowing what to do. Like what things do I should I focus on right now? Maybe I should go go to college again. I've heard of um a couple of weeks ago, nobody's looking for a content creator anymore. They're looking for an content updater, who's somebody who knows about SEO, knows about social media, knows about optimization. So yeah, just basically three people in one because the AI the AI can can help you take care of everything else. So that is something that that I'm already thinking about like a lot of us are worried what to do. So we're just trying to sort of jump on everything else and just try become an expert in in something else or like a prompt expert at least in that I wanted to ask you about the tools or platforms that you use or that you rely on to validate create and monitor maybe a schema and infrastructure. Anything that
you can address? feel like all the tools I would recommend are like the ones that are out already, right? You've got um schema visualizers, you've got classy schema, the old school rich snippet, structured data stuff, search console for structured data, that's the stuff that's still audit, right? And all the big tools have it as well. But when it comes to how content and your brand in general in terms of tools for monitoring, they're like all being born now. I feel like there's a new platform or tool every month coming out um which is also quite interesting. You've got like profound um Gumshu which I tried which has a free little trial and Dixon Jones who used to have uh Majestic he's now got what AI knows about youai I think it's called and then you've got other big tool providers who are now doing their AI toolkit or auditing. Um, I know Cyrix just um introduced theirs as well, I think in beta. Or is it just come out of beta? I'm not sure. But there's a few out there, but again, the dust is very much not settling, right? There's going to be a few more coming
out. And I guess it also is going to be a weird one on which one's going to stick because even now, can you say that Open AI in 3 years is going to be the dominant force? Because maybe it will be and it'll be the new Google, but maybe it's the MySpace and maybe there's a Facebook out there that, you know, is just coming up. Maybe Claude is that underdog right now that's just going to leak through through some technology that just on the mass market helps everyone. But at the moment, you know, the only people, all my friends and family who have no technological background, they don't know what Claude is. They are just some know about Gemini, but basically it's all chatgpt and they're now verbing it as well. Like instead of googling it, they're now chatgpting it. And I find that interesting on what repercussions that will have. But I feel like OpenAI should kind of be opening a tool for us as well because if anyone's going to have that firsthand data like Google made search console and Bing makes web master tools. Perhaps there should be a solution
inside OpenAI maybe they're building it. I don't know. I don't actually know. But like maybe they may maybe they are and it would be a great solution that all of these tool providers should have their own versions of search console or insights and then you can layer that with MCP as well which is now is it a hot topic or is it a bubble? I don't know but MCP is great because like a USBC for data and information that you can use and integrate with claw to ask about anything really about different data sources which is very interesting. and this podcast comes out. Um, a rumor has it that CH chat GPT5 is going to drop really soon. So maybe cuz they're already asking like for $200 to do a lot of stuff. So maybe that will also be become a part of their package uh optimizing even structured data. Yeah, we'll >> interesting. Interesting. And they're getting and they've now announced in the last day or x amount of days or weeks ago now is that they're now getting into the browser game. And it would there was a bit of rumor before, but I think they've now pretty much announced that they're going to be developing a browser
and therefore they're in direct competition with Chrome again, which is interesting cuz it's beyond just the conversational elements of their platform now. Now it's everything. It's browsing history. And I do believe that if Chad GPT or OpenAI, sorry, created a browser and they released it tomorrow, I think a lot of people would install it for sure. Yeah, there's a lot of haters for Chrome. I don't know a lot of SEO specialists who don't even use Chrome or they just use it for that one specifically just to interact with Chrome in that environment but they just hate I hate all the stuff that happens behind the scenes and how they just frack of you. Yeah. So yeah it's very interesting to see how that pans out. Another question is that I have is about measuring the results. So what specifically do you look out to to understand that okay this site uh this page is optimized in terms of structured data. It's doing is doing well. How do you understand that it's everything's right or wrong? >> Well, talking about MCPs before, you can actually connect to your site as well. There's a couple of things out there. One's called NL Web, another one's
called Clarity. They're both by Bing. Think of them as a way in which you can enable search on your site in a natural language manner. So, at the moment, if you go on any site, generally it's the again old school magnifying glass or a search input. You type in a keyword and it goes in. Now, now with things like an L web, you can make that conversational. So, yeah. So, forget for a second you're an M searcher, now you're back being the SEO. Get an L web connected and start asking questions that you've just asked me about its own data and then it will tell you what it perceives and then you can then take that information or answers, responses, and then do something about it. Or it can suggest, well, if you were interpreting it this way, how have I got it wrong? what can you what should I do to improve that and then work on those things. So that's kind of onsite. But other than that, I would say the tools out there have things like share and voice, you know, online online general online visibility compared to that of your competitor, persona visibility, um, and topic
visibility, which I know that a couple of these platforms who've got AI insights and tracking and monitoring kind of do try and get based on, I don't know, based on maybe 10 to 20 um, prompts that it saves and then keeps on tracking what the answer is over time. But even then, it's more complex, isn't it? I think it's it chat GPT. It was um a research that just came out that desktop and mobile the exact same prompt brings out different results. You can't it's not as easy as it used to be because it makes every scenario different unique like a snowflake where at the moment we've not been dealing with snowflake data where there's no true connection or correlation between them at the moment we have to interpret what that is. >> Yeah. right now in our AI search tool and rankings AI search tool we have these prompts that produce brands as answers. So this is like what we focus on to help companies. But another thing that we do is we run the same prompt three times back to back but three times right now only because yeah we're thinking like okay is this enough? Maybe we should do it five times maybe 10 times. Sometimes we even simulate like a
location even though it sounds weird but like people I would I would always use chatt from Ukraine in English but I don't simulate like ask something like that but it sometimes understands already. So we do the same thing trying to address the situation. It's still evolving thing but yeah it's very interesting to see that results can can change on the same day like there can be no overlaps with organic results sometimes yeah it's just it's a very a weird situation but it's it's a ongoing developing situation for sure and I wanted to ask you if you have any tips and tricks for seasoned structured data enthusiasts maybe like imagine that you have a colleague who is like yourself and is there something that you would willing to share with that colleague >> make sure well I've said it a couple of times product varants. I know that if if we go the way in which if we take on what Google and the like have done in the past when it's come to monetizing their products, they have to get ads in fast. And generally the first safest ads to put in are products. So if you're on
ecom and I go and I was talking about product variance and the size of your shoe, I would say get on top of that right now. Make sure all the right schemas being output in the right places. And if you don't have the ability to do it, just like start tapping on seuite store and maybe saying that this is going to be more important, making sure it's as close to merchant center requirements as possible. Don't just do what SEOs might do with schema, but go a step further as though you're doing ads, even if you're not, and populate all of that and make sure that's all satisfied. And then that's more to pick up in LLMs, cuz that's what they're going to do, and they have been already doing product recommendations and ads based on it. So, it's all about products here. Do you think there are any niches that are not using schema or structured data enough that are just thinking that it's not for them? Because you said e-commerce a couple times. Understand that they they will make that connection, but maybe there's like I don't know a health mental health service provider or something like maybe a SAS. Is there something some business that you that may think that it's not relevant for them, but it is actually relevant for everybody? Maybe you can
sort of comment on a distant industry or niche that sort of may maybe overlooking structured data. maybe academics like there's there's different structured data that's supported as well for long form studies and courses and things like that. I know a couple have gone I forgot which seven have gone from the actual Google support and I think one of them may have been courses I'm not sure but doing that kind of the old school the old school niches that are kind of only becoming digitally aware now they're that far behind things that have been in filing cabinets on paper like when they digitize that they talk to them about structured data that's way that's 20 years from now like I'm just guessing online I've got email now that's the thing and they and they're obviously not thinking about that stuff at the moment But they should if they're getting digitized now. Not just again structured data or schema but how they can be entities within themselves legal medical. Brilliant Alex really thank you for this conversation and I'm going to do the wrap- up here and say that this is it for today's episode with Alex Moss
on how AI ready structured data can revolutionize the way we optimize websites for Google's answer engines and other search engines. I hope you're leaving with a deeper understanding of how structured data can help you harness the power of AI and search. Thank you again, Alex, for sharing your expertise with us today. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for all all our listeners for tuning in and be sure to subscribe to the Do Follow podcast and stay tuned for more updates, insights and see you next time. [Music]
Key takeaways
Chapters
Q&A
Alex fell into SEO as a teenager building fan sites and doing accidental black hat tactics, then progressed into WordPress around 2009 where he became fascinated with structured data and entity relationships, eventually joining Yoast to work on schema implementation at scale. — Alex Moss
Schema started as simple SERP enhancements (recipes, reviews) and grew from under 300 types in 2011 to 799 today. Growth has plateaued with seven types recently removed, suggesting optimization has peaked. Schema now feeds AI systems and LLMs beyond just traditional search. — Alex Moss
AI-ready goes beyond structured data markup to include structured content: concise, hierarchical information that LLMs can tokenize efficiently. It requires thinking about how content flows and is presented, treating LLM ingestion differently than traditional crawler interpretation. — Alex Moss
LLMs ingest content differently than crawlers, prioritizing conciseness and clarity over marketing fluff. Content structure—information order, concept hierarchy, and relationships—matters significantly. Using tokenization tools to understand how LLMs parse content is now essential for optimization. — Alex Moss
Google's AI Overviews extract and synthesize content, then cite it with source links that jump to contextually highlighted sections (marked with hashtags). Tracking these highlighted pages via server logs and GA4 allows measurement of which content pieces Google's AI finds most useful. — Alex Moss
Nothing is explicitly prioritized, but everything must be populated—schema completeness matters more than depth. Product variants are particularly important for e-commerce; all size and variant options should be marked up as distinct products to enable size-specific AI recommendations. — Alex Moss
Over-experimentation and over-complexity are common errors. Adding 200 schema properties hoping 'something will pick it up' wastes bytes and is ineffective against LLMs, which detect manipulation instantly. Keep schema focused, concise, and relevant—avoid spam. — Alex Moss
Traditional tools like schema visualizers, Search Console, and rich snippet validators remain useful. For AI monitoring, new platforms emerge monthly (Profound, Gumsho, WhatAIKnows). The ecosystem is still consolidating; no single standard has emerged yet. — Alex Moss
Quotes
“I didn't realize I was doing SEO when I was a teenager. I used to build websites like I had a South Park fan website and I was doing black hat SEO without realizing that that was what I was doing.” — Alex Moss
“LLMs don't care about any of that. They just want get to the point. Get what do you do? And be clear and concise and honest and transparent because LLMs don't care about content marketing fluff around what the actual point and the intent of it is.” — Alex Moss
“How do you remove that zero-click issue? How do you make that click happen? I guess that's just like in a marketing way of just giving someone something to wet their appetite that might require more investigation in order to come to that your site.” — Alex Moss
“Black hats have hated that all that time. And now I go back when from an agency point of view, I've always said unbranded mentions are good anyway. Now LLM will consider that as aged authority, which now some agencies might be going, crap, I've been doing it one way all this time to try and game an algorithm where now it's gone beyond anything I can control.” — Alex Moss
“If ChatGPT or OpenAI released a browser tomorrow, I think a lot of people would install it for sure.” — Alex Moss