Does Schema Really Matter for SEO and AI Search? | James Dooley Interviews Dixon Jones (James Dooley Interviews Dixon Jones)

James Dooley (0:00)

Is Schema Important? Today I'm joined with Dixon Jones. Let's jump straight into it. In your opinion, Dixon, do you think that Schema is important?

Dixon Jones (0:11)

I think Schema is a fact of life, but I should clarify that.

Schema, I think, comes from the Greek. So as Aristotle or somebody decided that, you know, it would make much more sense if he started organizing things into groups. And I think online and on the internet, the word Schema has changed, but in another way, it hasn't. For those of us that are old enough to remember going into a library and seeing all those little numbers on the back of books, can you imagine going into a library without having numbers on the back of books that the librarian could look up and figure out, you know, here's the book on chess or here's the book on astronomy or here's the book on... So this idea of Schema is about organizing things into groups and it just makes everything much more efficient. If you want to try and find all the books on astronomy in your library and you know, now I'm taking the metaphor of a library being the internet, then it's much easier if you've got a system that has already organized all the websites into categories and then within that into ideas and concepts and stuff so that you can easily go through a database and say, all right, I'm looking up all the things that are talking about astronomy and the earth and civilization all in the same breath, bring it all back and then I can get there very much quicker than going through and trying to crawl all the internet on the fly to find the pages that are relevant. So schema helps with indexing, it helps with organization, it helps with retrieval.

I think that there is a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding now as to how much modern machines, LLMs are reading or not reading schema on the fly.

The truth is, they're not reading schema on the fly. So when you ask them to read two pages and compare them, for example, they'll use bits of code or tools within their system that will go and just take the words on the page, the words that humans can see, rip out everything else and then base their answer on that. So in that sense, schema at that point is not relevant. But schema is relevant for everything that the machine might want to do to try and organize concepts before that point. So it's not good for reading it on the fly and then interpreting that and matching it all up, at least an LLM isn't on instant retrieval. But it doesn't mean to say that the world is not organized around topics and ideas, and Freebase was bought by MetaWeb, owned a thing called Freebase, which was bought by Google back in 2014, so 12 years ago or more, and that was a big database. They spent, I think billions, but anyway many, many millions, and I'm not sure if the number was ever disclosed. Freebase never had a revenue stream. They bought it, they put it in there, and they started to think about the world in terms of ideas and topics or entities as I call them.

Schema helps to map those ideas to entities. I think that Schema is extremely important. I think that it will remain important. I think even if machines didn't use it, it is important because the world needs to be grouping things into four-legged animals, two-legged animals and fish. It just makes things quicker.

James Dooley (4:05)

Yeah, I mean, personally, I was trying to get my knowledge panel and I was trying to connect certain things together. And until I actually put the Schema in place with the same Schema, it was getting me muggled up quite a lot with regards to, there was also a musician called James Dooley. And there was like a mismatch of information and part of my knowledge panel had his information, part of it had my information. I was able to categorize and put it all together and get my entity and get my KGMID. The minute I was able to group all that and they knew with confidence and clarity of exactly who I was, my knowledge panel popped up, as my knowledge panel popped up, everything else just started to fall into place. All my social started showing up within there and stuff like that. And yeah, from that point of view, I found it incredible.

Dixon Jones (4:53)

I had the same situation with Dixon Jones. There was an architect firm called Dixon Jones, which was a bugbearer and a nightmare for me for 20 years. But fortunately, they went bankrupt a few years ago, so that was helpful. But they still have a Wikipedia page. I mean, they were around, they did design a Royal Opera House, and they've done some important stuff in their lives.