GEO's get rich quick schema

Anyone else ready to update their resume to "Trying my best"? In a world without documentation, it's easy to look at a site that's crushing and and think they're surviving the AEO/GEO/AIO/alphabet soup fire storm because of something they're doing right. They did schema so therefore we must do schema. They did chunking so we have to do chunking.

Survivorship bias is a logical error that happens when we focus only on the people or things that "survived" a particular process, while completely ignoring those that didn't. Because the "failures" are invisible to us, we end up drawing false conclusions about what it takes to succeed.

And then Google stepped into the ring with their first piece of AI Search documentation. The article's mythbusting section rolled over hype with vicious efficacy. That "special" markup? Stop it. Stop trying to make chunk happen. And while we're at it– stop overfocusing on structured data.

"Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add." This nicely backs up Ahref's recent study where Louise Linehan and team added schema to 1.9K pages and saw results "Statistically indistinguishable from zero." As Gary once warned us: excessive or redundant schema only adds page bloat and is not used as part of the ranking process.