Structured data in the age of AI Overviews: how to prepare your site's schema

Structured data gains an extra layer of relevance in the age of generative search: it's the same input that helps Google understand a page's content, whether for traditional rich results or, in this article's reading, for features like AI Overviews. See how MarTech teams in Brazil can adapt schema and measure the before and after.

Publishers in Brazil are living with a silent shift in the discovery funnel: part of the searches that used to generate a click now end in an AI-generated answer, like AI Overviews. In this scenario, appearing as a cited source within the answer has become as concrete a goal as ranking in the first blue position. And the input that helps Google understand (and reuse) a page's content remains the same one behind rich results: structured data.

A Google Search Central's documentation on structured data is the honest starting point for this conversation, even though it doesn't mention AI Overviews specifically. What it makes explicit is the mechanism: Google uses the structured data it finds on the web to understand page content and gather information about people, books and businesses described in the markup. In this article's reading, it's this machine understanding that, by extension, would also feed generative search features, even though the official documentation doesn't address this point.

What structured data does under the hood

Structured data is a standardized format for describing and classifying a page's content. In a recipe, for example, the markup states what the ingredients are, the prep time, the temperature and the calories, instead of leaving the search engine to guess this from the running text. Google treats the Search Central documentation as the definitive reference for what it supports, even though the vocabulary comes from schema.org. Not everything that exists in schema.org is used by Google, but that's the foundation.

The documentation's central technical message: mark up only what's visible to the user. In Google's own words, you should not "create blank or empty pages just to hold structured data," nor add markup about information that doesn't appear on the page, even if it's true. Schema is not a place to hide data, and this rule applies equally to the generative era: the model needs to find a match between the markup and the actual content.

JSON-LD, and why it won

Google accepts three formats, all equally valid when well implemented:

| Format | Where it lives | Note | |---|---|---| | JSON-LD (recommended) |