Transcript:

Hey everyone, I’m Chris Long with Nectiv, and for today’s GEO tip, I want to talk through why we think that structured data might play a really big role in the sites that get sourced in ChatGPT specifically.

What’s really interesting is we’ve been tracking Amazon’s prompt library for a while. We’ve been tracking about 500 different prompts related to products that rank well in Amazon, and we track them on ChatGPT specifically. And what’s interesting is, for a lot of these commerce queries, a lot of sites that you wouldn’t expect to be visible end up being pretty visible here.

Reddit is number one — that’s probably a discussion for a different day — but number two is New York Magazine for a lot of e-commerce queries. FindThisBest is number three. People.com is number five. Some of these are really interesting and not brands or companies you would normally associate with commerce content.

Now, a lot of these are affiliate articles, but what’s interesting is when I start searching here — like on New York Mag’s “15 Best Vacuums” — they’re using Product Schema to mark up every single product they list.

I keep seeing this across all these different brands. Here’s People — same thing. I go in and see they have Article Schema, but if you go further down, they also have an ItemList element, and directly inside that, they list individual products as Product structured data.

FindThisBest is really interesting because it’s a site that’s essentially been blackballed from Google. If you look at their organic search results, they’ve been completely crushed — basically flatlined to zero. But if you go to the schema markup of any of their pages, they use Product structured data directly on the page as well.

So this is at least a pretty strong indication: if you look at some of the top-performing sites that are getting sourced in ChatGPT, a lot of them are using structured data — specifically Product structured data.

Obviously this isn’t 100% conclusive evidence, but it’s definitely telling that structured data is widely used by many of the sites performing well in ChatGPT.

So our advice is: structured data can probably help you and your site get sourced more in generative engines.