The biggest schema study ever run just dropped. Here's what it actually proves — and what it doesn't. There's a fight happening in every SEO group right now over a new controlled study on schema markup, and most of the takes on both sides are wrong. Let's do this properly. What the study was. 29 businesses, 36 locations, one industry. Every site stripped of ALL schema and verified clean. Five weeks of nothing. Then LocalBusiness schema added to half the sites, five more weeks, tracked across Google, Bing, Yahoo, Google Maps geogrids, and five AI platforms. Results run through a proper statistical confidence test with a 90% bar. Peer-reviewed before the results existed — by believers AND skeptics, including the guy who literally helped build Schema.org. That's a real study. Not a screenshot with an arrow on it. Here's Moz's coverage of it: https://moz.com/blog/does-schema-markup-impact-serp-rank What it found — the part the "schema is dead" crowd is right about: Schema did not move organic rankings. Not on Google, not on Bing, not on Yahoo. And on Google Maps — measured across an 81-point geogrid — the group WITHOUT schema actually performed slightly better. No effect on Maps rank. No effect on local visibility share. If anyone is selling you schema as the thing that gets you to page one, that pitch is now dead on arrival. It was never supposed to be a ranking lever, and now there's controlled evidence. What it found — the part the same crowd is skipping past: The one place schema moved the needle past the 90% confidence bar — past it twice — was ChatGPT. - ~93% confidence that adding LocalBusiness schema improved the brand's position in ChatGPT's recommendations, by about 3 spots - ~92% confidence it increased how OFTEN ChatGPT included the brand at all — by 10 percentage points Sit with that. Ten points more inclusion in the answers your future customers are reading, from an afternoon of implementation. In a study designed and reviewed largely by schema skeptics.