Digital Applied 5K-site audit (Apr 2026): only 22% of schema implementations pass Google Rich Results Test (r=+0.34 with AI citation)

Claim: Digital Applied audited 5,000 production sites (April 2026). 71% deploy at least one schema type; only 22% pass Google's Rich Results Test cleanly. Pearson correlation between clean-validation rate and AI-citation frequency: r = +0.34.

Source: https://digitalapplied.com/blog/schema-markup-adoption-5k-site-audit-2026

Confidence: Single-source (vendor-published; methodology not independently audited).

Implication: "Has schema" is a useless metric. "Has valid schema" is the lever — and most installed-base schema is broken (missing required properties, conflicting nested types, scraping-error strings in title fields). Candid clients should ship validated schema, not just emit <script type="application/ld+json"> and hope.