Listen: Google’s AI Uses Schema?
An investigation into whether Google uses structured data to ground Gemini in AI search, exploring the relationship between LD+JSON and RAG grounding sources.
Transcript
Does Google's AI search use structured data to find its answers? Recent findings suggest it might, which could be a big deal for search engine optimization.
An analysis of Gemini's search sources revealed a specific sentence used to ground an answer. But when visiting the source webpage, that sentence was nowhere to be seen. A look at the code showed the text was hidden inside the page's schema, specifically in its structured data.
At first, this looked like proof that Gemini reads structured data directly. But there is a catch. The exact same text might have also been present on the page inside a hidden element, like a dropdown accordion or a tab. If the content is in both places, we cannot prove which one the AI actually retrieved.
To solve this mystery, we need to test pages where the structured data differs from the hidden page content. By placing one unique word in the schema and a different one in a hidden tab, we can finally see which source Gemini prefers. Until then, the theory remains unproven, but it highlights just how much hidden content still matters for the future of AI search.