Red Isle WebIf you run a business in Charlottetown, you may already have had an email from a developer offering to add an "AI schema package" to your website for an extra fee, promising it will get your name mentioned when customers ask ChatGPT who to call. It sounds technical enough to be real, and most owners have no way to check it.
Schema markup is a block of code behind the page that tells a computer what the page contains: this is a business, these are the hours, this is the price. Visitors never see it, so it is hard for an owner to judge.
Schema markup does very little to get you cited by ChatGPT, going by a study from Ahrefs, the SEO software company, that tracked 1,885 pages adding it between August 2025 and March 2026. Citations in ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode rose about 2% afterward, a difference Ahrefs says cannot be told apart from zero. Citations in Google's AI Overviews, the AI-written answer at the top of many searches, fell 4.6%, though those pages were already sliding before the code went on. None of it points to the code helping.
What does schema markup do?
Google uses it to decide whether a page can show extras in ordinary search results, such as a star rating or a price beside the listing. Its documentation calls that eligibility, never a guarantee. A developer selling an AI package is promising something else, which is a mention inside ChatGPT.
So does it get you cited more often?
Ahrefs compared those pages against matched pages that never added the code and counted citations for 30 days before and 30 days after, so a boom or slump across all of AI search would not fool the result. ChatGPT came out 2.2% higher and AI Mode 2.4% higher. Ahrefs also cites an experiment by SearchVIU in which five AI systems, ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode among them, read only the visible text when they fetched a page live and skipped the schema code entirely.
Every page in the study already had 100 or more AI Overview citations in February 2025, so it describes pages AI already uses and says nothing about a site that has never been cited, and Ahrefs only measured the 30 days after the code went on.
Then why do so many AI-cited pages have it?
About 53% of the AI-cited pages Ahrefs examined carry schema, and cited pages were almost three times as likely to have it as pages that are not cited. Ahrefs puts that down to the kind of site that bothers adding it, one that also invests in the rest of its SEO, from content to technical fixes, so the code marks a well-run site more than it causes the citations.
"Isn't it safer to just add it anyway?"
Basic schema does no harm, and a version that describes your business, with its name, address and hours, belongs in any properly built site. Google's own page on its AI features says no special structured data is needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. That makes a separate fee for an AI package hard to justify. A basic version included in the build price is fine.
The good news
You do not need to pay extra for an AI package to be found by ChatGPT or Google's AI answers, and nobody can guarantee a mention there anyway. The money goes further on a site AI tools can read cleanly, business details that match everywhere you are listed and reviews from your customers, which help you in ordinary search too.
Every site I build here at Red Isle Web carries the basic business schema as part of the build, for Island businesses, at a one-time price with no monthly fee, so there is no AI package to buy later. Have a look at my work, or send me a note and I will check what the code behind your current site tells a computer about your business and list what is missing.