Claude's Compound Trust Multiplier for JSON-LD

Here's what Claude actually sees in your structured data - and it's not counting JSON-LD blocks.

Claude evaluates diversity, consistency, and interconnection of schema types to build a compound trust score. A single Organization schema? Baseline. Add FAQPage? Small boost - Claude can cross-reference the organization entity with the FAQ content, confirming they're the same business.

Three schema types - say, Organization + FAQPage + BreadcrumbList - and something clicks. Claude now has enough structured data to triangulate identity, content structure, and navigation hierarchy. We call this the "trust threshold." Claude shifts from "this might be relevant" to "this is a well-documented source I can cite with confidence."

At four-plus types (Organization + FAQPage + Article + BreadcrumbList, or Organization + WebSite + Service + Product), compound scoring activates. Each additional type has diminishing solo returns, but the compound effect lets Claude build a rich, machine-readable model of your site's purpose, content, and authority. That model directly influences how prominently you appear in Claude's responses.

Two catches. First: internal consistency. If your Organization schema says "Acme Corp" but your Article schema says "Acme Corporation," Claude registers an inconsistency penalty. The compound multiplier only fires when schema types are coherent - same entity names, consistent URLs, matching contact info across all blocks.

Second: depth within types. A minimal Organization with just name and url provides less trust than one with address, email, telephone, logo, sameAs links, and foundingDate. Four shallow schema types can score lower than two deeply populated ones.

ChatGPT treats JSON-LD as a data extraction source, not a trust signal. Organization schema? ChatGPT grabs the business name and description. But having Organization plus FAQPage doesn't meaningfully increase ChatGPT's citation confidence - it just means more data to extract.

Google AI Overviews uses structured data extensively, but through a different lens. Google's algorithm weighs hundreds of signals simultaneously - backlinks, domain authority, Core Web Vitals. Adding a fourth schema type gets diluted by all that noise. Claude, with a more limited set of on-page signals, gives structured data proportionally more weight.

Perplexity's approach is closer to ChatGPT's. It uses structured data for extraction but doesn't apply a compound trust model. Adding schema types won't meaningfully change your Perplexity ranking.

The compound trust model is distinctly Claude's solution to source evaluation. Claude's training emphasizes accuracy and attribution, creating a natural affinity for sites that make information machine-readable at multiple levels. This governance-first philosophy means Claude disproportionately rewards the same signals enterprise-grade sites tend to implement - comprehensive schema, clean semantics, explicit machine-readable policies.

For sites already strong on ChatGPT, adding schema depth is the most efficient way to close the Claude visibility gap. The same schema that gives marginal ChatGPT benefit can unlock significant Claude compound trust bonuses.

Tidio.com deployed 4+ schema types across primary pages: Organization (comprehensive sameAs, address, contact), WebSite, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList. Blog content included Article schema with full author Person schema and credentials. Tidio's Claude bonus: +14. The compound trust effect showed up in test queries - Claude confidently cited Tidio's specific features and pricing. It treated Tidio as a well-documented, authoritative source.

LiveChat.com went deep on Organization - 15+ properties populated, including foundingDate, numberOfEmployees, areaServed. Extensive sameAs links (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub). Product pages included Product schema with offers and reviews. Help center used FAQPage and HowTo schemas. Result: Claude bonus of +12. Multi-type deployment with depth in every block.

Crisp.chat (overall: 34) deployed enough types to trigger the threshold. Organization with sameAs links, basic but complete address, BreadcrumbList on interior pages. Not as deep as Tidio or LiveChat, but enough to hit 3 types. Claude bonus: +17. For a site scoring 34 overall, a +17 Claude bonus is remarkable. It shows Claude's compound trust can partially compensate for weaknesses in content quality and technical implementation.

HelpSquad.com had minimal structured data - a basic Organization with only name and url. No other schema types. One shallow type. Below the trust threshold entirely. Claude penalty: -5 (HelpSquad: Claude 42, ChatGPT 47). The gap maps directly to compound trust: ChatGPT evaluated content quality and found it adequate (47). Claude's governance evaluation found the structured data insufficient for confident citation.

The pattern across our 20-site cohort is clean: sites with 3+ schema types averaged a Claude bonus of +11. Sites with fewer than 3 averaged a -3 penalty. That trust threshold at 3 types is the single most impactful finding in our Claude-specific data.

Start here: audit your current schema. Use Google's Rich Results Test or Schema.org's validator to identify deployed types and property completeness. Document what you have, what's populated, and any naming inconsistencies across blocks. Your goal: hit the 3-type trust threshold fast, then build toward 4+ for compound scoring.

Nail Organization schema first - it's the foundation everything else references. Minimum properties: name, url, logo, description, address (full PostalAddress with street, city, region, postal code, country), email, telephone, sameAs (array of social profile URLs), foundingDate. If applicable, add numberOfEmployees, areaServed, parentOrganization. Use the exact same business name string everywhere.

Add BreadcrumbList to every interior page - easiest second type to implement. Use your existing nav hierarchy to generate position-based breadcrumb items. Each item needs position (integer), name (human-readable), and item (URL). Last item in the list should not include an item URL (it's the current page). This helps Claude understand content hierarchy and is required for Google's breadcrumb rich results.

Implement FAQPage on any page with Q&A content. Dedicated FAQ pages, product pages with FAQ sections, service pages with common questions. Each Question needs a name (question text) and acceptedAnswer with a text property (the answer). Make sure schema content matches visible page content exactly - Claude cross-references schema text against rendered HTML and penalizes discrepancies.

Add Article or BlogPosting to all editorial content with full author, datePublished, dateModified, publisher (referencing your Organization), and headline. For the author property, use a nested Person schema with name, jobTitle, and sameAs links - not a simple string. This connects content-level schema to entity-level Organization schema, creating the cross-type coherence that drives Claude's compound trust. After each new type, validate all schema blocks together for consistent entity naming and URLs.