FAQ Schema Gets You 2.7x More AI Citations. But Not for the Reason You Think.

A 2025 Relixir study found that pages with FAQPage schema achieve a 41% AI citation rate versus 15% without — roughly 2.7x higher. That's a real number from a real study. But here's the thing: AI models don't parse your JSON-LD as structured data. They tokenize it as raw text, the same way they'd read a paragraph. We just added FAQ schema to 36 pages on our site. Before we did, we wanted to understand why it works — because the mechanism matters more than the correlation. Here's what we found. The experiment that changed how I think about schema In February 2026, SEO researcher Mark Williams-Cook ran a controlled experiment. He created a page for a fake company and embedded an address exclusively inside invalid, made-up JSON-LD schema — not in any visible page content. The schema type didn't even exist. Both ChatGPT and Perplexity successfully extracted and returned the address. That tells us two things: LLMs can read JSON-LD — they tokenize it like any other text on the page. LLMs don