Ahrefs (April 2026): adding schema to 1,885 pages produced no AI-citation lift; AI Overviews showed -4.6%

Claim: Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages adding JSON-LD between Aug 2025 and Mar 2026, matched against 4,000 control pages. "Adding schema produced no major uplift in citations on any platform." AI Overviews on treated pages declined 4.6% more than controls (statistically significant); AI Mode and ChatGPT showed small, non-significant changes.

Source: Ahrefs, "We Tracked 1,885 Pages Adding Schema. AI Citations Barely Moved." April 2026. https://ahrefs.com/blog/schema-ai-citations/

Confidence: Verified.

Critical caveat: Every page in the study already had 100+ AI Overview citations before treatment. The study measures whether schema moves already-cited pages, not whether it helps pages get cited in the first place. Confounded for acquisition; valid for incremental lift.

Contested by: Suganthan Mohanadasan ("three lives of schema") and SchemaApp — both argue the study only measures one of three schema effects (real-time query fetch), missing the larger Knowledge Graph and training-data effects that compound over years. See Schanbacher (SSRN 2025): FAQPage and Product schema strongly predict ChatGPT visibility (single-domain peer-reviewed) for a contrasting peer-reviewed finding on acquisition.

Used for: the "schema is necessary infrastructure, not a citation hack" framing. See RULE: Always ship schema as hygiene. Never expect it alone to move AI citations..