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Report: ChatGPT & Perplexity Treat Structured Data As Text On A Page

A recent test by Mark Williams‑Cook showed that ChatGPT and Perplexity treat JSON‑LD schema markup as ordinary page text, extracting data even when the markup is invalid. The experiment used a fictitious company, DUCKYEA t‑shirts, and placed its address solely inside malformed schema, yet both LLMs returned the address in response to prompts. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have offered differing statements about the role of structured data in LLM outputs, but the test suggests current models do not parse schema semantics. The findings reignite debate over the SEO value of schema for AI‑driven search.