RULE: Always ship schema as hygiene. Never expect it alone to move AI citations.

Rule: Always ship clean, validated schema (LocalBusiness, Organization, Service, Product, Article, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage where genuinely applicable) on every Candid Creative client site. Never position schema to a client as the lever that will move AI citations on its own.

Why: Three independent findings converge on this stance.

• Google's own May 15, 2026 guidance says schema is not required for AI Overviews. See Google (May 2026): "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search".
• Ahrefs' April 2026 controlled study on 1,885 pages found no AI-citation lift from adding JSON-LD; on AI Overviews specifically, treated pages declined 4.6% more than controls. See Ahrefs (April 2026): adding schema to 1,885 pages produced no AI-citation lift; AI Overviews showed -4.6%.
• But the Schanbacher peer-reviewed real-estate study shows Product schema correlates with 10× ChatGPT visibility on acquisition (single-domain). See Schanbacher (SSRN 2025): FAQPage and Product schema strongly predict ChatGPT visibility (single-domain peer-reviewed). Whitespark 2026 added AI Search Visibility as a formal category with structured data named as a direct input. See Whitespark 2026: AI Search Visibility added as a formal local ranking category for the first time.

Schema is necessary infrastructure for entity disambiguation, rich results, and the Knowledge Graph (Suganthan's three lives — see Suganthan: schema has three lives — index-time, training-time, query-time). It is not a citation hack. The citation lever is the content patterns above schema: quotations, statistics, citations, freshness, comprehensive topic coverage.

How to apply: Every Candid client site emits validated schema by default — generated programmatically from the same data source as the visible content, so the two never drift. Schema cost is essentially zero (JSON-LD is non-render-blocking, 1-10 KB per page). The argument made to clients is "this is the foundation; the citation work lives on top."