There is a big debate in the SEO community on the topic of schema markup and LLMs. Do LLMs like Microsoft Bing's Copilot, Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity and others use schema markup and structured data in any way. Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, said they do.
At least Microsoft does.
David Mihm posted on LinkedIn that Fabrice Canel confirmed this while on stage at SMX Munich the other day. David wrote, "Fabrice Canel confirms that schema markup helps Microsoft’s LLMs understand your content in his excellent SMX - Search Marketing Expo in Munich presentation."
"Gen AIs value fresh content in particular, partly as a reference check of their LLM training data. Use the API at indexnow.org to push that information as it’s published or updated," he said Fabrice Canel said.
Fabrice commented on the post and wrote, "Thanks, please to help all of you." So he did not deny saying it, so it must be true.
I mean, this makes sense, based on how Microsoft Copilot works with Prometheus. Prometheus, the code name for how Bing Chat, now Copilot, works in Bing Search is "how Bing is able to combine the up-to-date and comprehensive Bing Search index and ranking system, plus the answers results "with the creative reasoning capabilities of OpenAI's most-advanced GPT models," Jodi Ribas explained back then.
So sure, Bing does crawl, index and process schema for both web search and LLMs.
Does Gemini? Does Google AI Overviews? Does Google AI Mode? What about OpenAI's ChatGPT or the others?
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
