Search results are no longer a row of blue links. Generative engines—Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, and countless assistants—now compose answers on the fly. Those systems do not rely only on keywords such as “best PPC agency”; they also look for structured clues that confirm facts, relationships, and context. Schema markup provides that layer of machine‑readable meaning, and it now influences whether a brand’s information is quoted or forgotten when an AI drafts its reply.