# Does FAQPage schema raise AI crawl frequency or citation?

> Half the GEO industry says FAQPage JSON-LD wins AI citations; the other half says LLMs ignore hidden markup. This adds FAQ + FAQPage schema to one article, holds a comparable one unchanged, and measures the difference. Proposed — awaiting editorial go-ahead.

Experiment: exp-002
Status: planned
Metric: crawler-hits
Canonical: https://geosalience.com/lab/experiments/exp-002
Window: 2026-06-07T00:00:00.000Z → 2026-07-07T00:00:00.000Z
Hypothesis: Adding a FAQ section plus FAQPage JSON-LD to an article raises its AI-crawler hit frequency and (site-wide) citation rate, relative to a comparable article left unchanged.
What changed: Treatment article gains a FAQ section (drawn from its existing H2/H3 questions) plus a FAQPage JSON-LD block. Control article is left exactly as is. No other change to either page in the window.
Treatment pages: /technical/llms-txt-spec-adoption-setup
Control pages: /foundations/what-is-geo

---
**Status: proposed.** This protocol is published for transparency, but the experiment has not started. No page has been changed. The start and review dates above are proposed, not actual; the editor picks which experiments run and confirms the control/treatment pairing, because comparability is a judgment call.

## The question

Does shipping `FAQPage` JSON-LD actually earn more AI attention, or do the crawlers just read the visible page and ignore the markup? This is the smaller, on-site version of the [MVP-4 Schema.org A/B test design](/technical/llms-txt-spec-adoption-setup) — one matched pair on our own domain, as a first signal before any multi-domain study.

## Proposed design

- **Treatment:** add a FAQ section and a `FAQPage` block to [the llms.txt spec article](/technical/llms-txt-spec-adoption-setup).
- **Control:** leave [What is GEO?](/foundations/what-is-geo) unchanged.
- **Primary metric:** AI-crawler hits per page, before vs after, treatment minus control (difference-in-differences).
- **Window:** a 14-day before window and a 30-day review after the change lands.

## Why the pairing needs editorial sign-off

The two pages are both live and both cornerstone, but they are different *types* — an explainer and a how-to — and page type plausibly affects how often a crawler returns. That is a real confounder. The stronger design waits until two same-type articles are live and pairs those instead. The editor decides whether to run the imperfect pair now (with the confounder disclosed) or wait for a clean one.

## What would count as a result

A clear, repeated rise in crawler hits on the treatment page that the control page does not share, sustained across the 30-day window. Anything smaller, on a two-page sample, we will report as inconclusive rather than dress up as a finding.