Our earlier post on schema markup for AEO covers FAQPage, Article, HowTo, and Organization: the types that do most of the real work. This post checks three separate claims that circulate in AEO advice against the vendors' own documentation. None of the three holds up as stated.
Myth 1: Product schema helps AI answer engines surface your products
Google's own Product structured data documentation describes Product schema purely in terms of classic Search rich results: product snippets, Shopping knowledge panels, and appearances in Google Images and Lens (price, availability, reviews, shipping). It makes no mention of AI Overviews, AI Mode, or any AI answer engine. We found no documentation from OpenAI, Perplexity, or Google's own AI features team stating that Product schema specifically improves how a product is surfaced in an AI-generated answer.
That does not mean Product schema is worthless. It is still the correct, documented way to get a product into classic Search rich results, which remain a real surface with real traffic. It is just not, on current vendor documentation, an AI-answer-engine lever. Treat it as a Search feature that happens to also be accurate structured data, not as an AEO tactic.
Myth 2: sameAs builds AI trust in your brand
The sameAs property (linking an Organization or Person to another URL, such as a Wikipedia page, Wikidata entry, or verified social profile) genuinely exists and is genuinely worth adding. Where the AEO advice overreaches is in what it claims sameAs does. A lot of SEO commentary describes it as helping AI systems "disambiguate" or "trust" an entity, sometimes with language implying an AI system actively follows sameAs links to confirm who you are.
Google's own Organization schema documentation defines the property much more narrowly: "the URL of a page on another website with additional information about your organization... a URL to your organization's profile page on a social media or review site." No mention of AI, disambiguation, or trust. That framing is schema.org's own general-purpose mechanism for identity linking, used the same way regardless of who or what is reading it, not a documented AI-specific signal.
The practical takeaway is not "don't bother." Linking your Organization schema to accurate, verifiable profile pages is cheap, correct, and consistent with how the property was designed to be used. Just don't oversell what it does in your own head: it is a factual link, not a proven trust mechanism.
Myth 3: there's a special schema type for AI Overviews or AI Mode
This is the easiest one to check, because Google has stated its position directly. Its own AI features documentation says: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add." That is a direct, current statement from Google Search Central, not a social media post or a secondary summary.
There is no AI-only schema type waiting to be discovered, and no vendor has published one. AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on the same underlying Search index and ranking systems as ordinary results, which is also why the existing FAQPage, Article, HowTo, and Organization types still matter: they were never AI-specific to begin with, they simply describe content clearly enough that both traditional search and AI systems can use them.
How we approach this
We add sameAs links and the schema types covered in our earlier post wherever they genuinely match real content, and we do not sell Product schema or sameAs as AI-visibility tactics beyond what the vendors themselves document. The work that actually moves AI citation is covered in how to get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity and how to structure content so AI can actually extract it, not in a schema type nobody has documented using.
Sources: Google's Product structured data documentation, Google's Organization structured data documentation, Google's AI features documentation.