Part of GEOly's "GEO / AEO Expert Watch" series · meet **Martha van Berkel**, a quick map of their public work and where to follow them — with links to the original sources.
Who is Martha van Berkel
Martha van Berkel is the co-founder and CEO of Schema App, a semantic technology company that helps enterprise brands control how they are represented in search and AI by building a structured data layer. Before founding the company, she spent 14 years at Cisco leading global online support strategy. She is one of the industry's leading voices on structured data and Schema markup, and a frequent conference speaker and blogger.
These experts put the entity at the center: AI is not matching keywords, it is understanding "who you are, what you relate to, and whether you can be trusted." Knowledge graphs, structured data and entity disambiguation are their shared language. Their recurring focus areas include: Schema markup, structured data, Schema App.
What GEO / AEO practitioners can learn from Martha van Berkel
- **Become a clear entity first**: keep brand, product and people consistent across Wikidata, your site and third-party sources so AI can merge scattered mentions into one "you." - **Feed the graph with structured data**: Schema.org, sameAs and explicit relationships help engines place you in the right knowledge neighborhood. - **Fact density beats rhetoric**: verifiable facts, numbers and relationships are recited by AI far more readily than flourish.
**GEOly angle**: The authority on using structured data as a bridge from traditional SEO to answer and AI engines.
What it means for brands going global
A hidden loss for global-facing brands is being split by AI into several fuzzy entities. Aligning names, categories and facts across your site, overseas socials, third-party directories and encyclopedic entries — so AI is sure "this is one trustworthy brand" — is where AEO begins.
Follow Martha van Berkel: homepage & socials
- [Website](https://www.schemaapp.com/author/martha-van-berkel/) - [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/marthavanberkel/) - [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@SchemaApp)
To meet more experts across GEO, AEO and agentic commerce, visit the [GEOly author hub](/blog/author).
*This profile is an editorial compilation of publicly available information, curated by the GEOly team for industry learning and reference. All links point to the expert's own public pages. Contact us for any correction or removal.*
