Schema markup has been part of SEO best practice for years, and most reasonably modern websites have some form of it — often added automatically by a CMS or plugin. But schema markup actually does two very different jobs, and most sites only ever do the first one.

Job one: structural description

The first job of schema is to describe the structure and type of content on a page — telling search engines "this is an article," "this is a recipe," "this is a local business listing with these opening hours." This is the schema most plugins generate automatically. It can produce rich results, breadcrumbs, and other search enhancements, and it's genuinely useful.

But structural schema describes the page. It doesn't, on its own, say anything about how that page's subject relates to anything outside the page.

Job two: entity alignment

The second job is different: connecting the subject of a page to an external entity record — explicitly stating that the business, person, or thing described on this page is the same as a specific, identified entity in a structured knowledge base elsewhere.

This is the job that almost no auto-generated schema performs, because it requires two things most plugins can't provide: knowledge that an external entity record exists, and the correct reference to that record.

The distinction in practice: structural schema says "this page is about a local business, and here are its opening hours." Entity-alignment schema says "the business described on this page is this specific, externally-defined entity — here's the reference."

Why both matter, but in different ways

Structural schema is still worth having — it supports rich results and helps search engines parse your content correctly. But if your goal includes AI visibility specifically, structural schema alone leaves the most important connection — the one to an entity record — unmade. Entity alignment is the piece that's both rarer and, for AI visibility purposes, more consequential.