Structured data will not make an assistant like you. What it does is remove ambiguity, so that when an assistant is deciding whether the Nex AI on this page is the same Nex AI it saw elsewhere, the answer is unambiguous. Four types carry almost all the value.
The four
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Organization
Who you are, stated once, consistently. Name, URL, logo, telephone, address, and sameAs pointing at the profiles that corroborate you. This is the entity anchor; without it you are a string of text rather than a company.
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Service
What you actually sell, one node per service, with an areaServed. This is what lets an assistant match a specific question to a specific offering rather than guessing from your homepage copy.
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FAQPage
Question and answer pairs, matching visible content on the page. The single most liftable format there is, because it is already in the shape an answer needs.
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Article or BlogPosting
For guides, with a real headline, dateModified and an author. Freshness signals matter more in assistant answers than they did in search, because assistants prefer current claims.
The fields that get ignored
Aggregate ratings you assert about yourself. Elaborate breadcrumb trails. Keyword-stuffed descriptions inside schema. Marking up things that are not visible on the page is worse than ignoring them, because schema that contradicts the page can get the whole graph discounted.
The rule that matters most
Schema must describe what a human can see. FAQ markup with no visible FAQs, or a price in structured data that appears nowhere on the page, is the fastest way to have your structured data distrusted. Match it exactly.
Where people get it wrong
The commonest failure is an inconsistent Organization node: a slightly different company name here, a different phone number there, a logo that only exists on one page. Assistants resolve entities by agreement across sources, so small inconsistencies do real damage. Pick one canonical form of your name and address and never vary it.
The second commonest is having no Organization node at all on most pages, because a plugin only emits it on the homepage. Check a deep page, not just the front one.
Questions we get asked
Does schema guarantee citation?
No. It removes ambiguity and makes you easier to quote correctly. The claim still has to be worth quoting, and ideally corroborated elsewhere.
Which format should we use?
JSON-LD in the head. It is the format every major consumer states a preference for, and it keeps structured data separate from your markup.
Can we mark up prices if we do not publish them?
No. If it is not visible on the page it should not be in the schema. If you want the benefit, publish the range.
How do we check it is working?
Fetch the page and parse every ld+json block yourself. Look for an Organization node on deep pages, not just the homepage, and confirm no field contains an unresolved template placeholder.