Customer Story
How Wells Fargo Used Schema Markup to Solve AI Search Hallucinations
Wells Fargo is a leading full-service financial institution, serving millions of customers across the United States. Operating in a highly regulated industry, the organization must ensure that every customer touchpoint is accurate, compliant, and up-to-date.
The Enterprise SEO Center of Excellence team at Wells Fargo supports multiple lines of business, including credit cards, mortgages, wealth management, business banking, and local branches. With such a large digital footprint, the team needed a trusted partner who could scale structured data across thousands of pages while meeting their strict compliance and security standards.
Challenges
Like many enterprises, Wells Fargo faced a new challenge with the rise of AI Overviews (AIOs) in Google Search. While their traditional SEO program was strong, AI Overviews began surfacing inaccurate and outdated information about their brand.
One striking example involved the Wells Fargo branch locator. An AI Overview falsely claimed that a branch in Hayden Lake, Idaho, had permanently closed, citing and misinterpreting a 20-year-old article as its source. Despite repeated reports to Google from their team and direct outreach to search representatives, the hallucination persisted for months.
For a regulated financial institution, this type of misinformation poses serious risks. Incorrect details not only mislead customers but also introduce compliance issues in a Your Money Your Life (YMYL) category, where accuracy is paramount. Wells Fargo needed a solution that could establish a reliable source of truth for search engines and AI systems.
Wells Fargo was already using Schema Markup to enhance their visibility in rich results, but as AI began influencing how information surfaced, the team recognized a broader opportunity. They needed a structured data solution that could go beyond traditional SEO—strengthening accuracy, scalability, and control across their digital ecosystem.
Operating within a large, regulated enterprise brought additional complexities:
- Rigid regulatory requirements preventing the use and effectiveness of traditional plugins.
- The need to integrate Schema Markup across multiple CMS environments.
- Risk of more outdated or inaccurate content surfacing in search results.
- A requirement for scalability across thousands of local and product-specific pages.
Solution
Wells Fargo partnered with Schema App to develop a robust, enterprise-grade structured data strategy that addressed both AI hallucinations and the deeper operational constraints of a regulated financial institution. Together, the teams deployed a self-hosted Schema Markup solution, custom-tailored to Wells Fargo’s security, governance, and infrastructure standards.
Key elements of the solution included:
- Custom self-hosted deployment built to meet internal security and policy requirements, allowing Wells Fargo to maintain full control over its data environment.
- Dynamic schema markup optimization across more than 1,200 pages, replacing insufficient or plugin-based markup with customized, accurate structured data that improved content clarity for both search engines and AI systems.
- Close partnership and agility: Schema App collaborated directly with Wells Fargo’s SEO, risk, and security teams to navigate complex review processes, ensure accuracy, and deliver ongoing strategic recommendations.
- Enterprise-level support: Wells Fargo had direct access to Schema App’s development and customer success teams, including leadership involvement to accelerate implementation and problem-solving.
- Integration across complex enterprise systems: The solution was engineered to work seamlessly across multiple CMS environments, enabling consistent, structured data management at scale.
When Wells Fargo’s SEO team added Schema Markup to their locator pages and key product content, the results were almost immediate. Within just a few weeks, the AI Overview that had falsely reported the Hayden Lake, Idaho, branch as “closed” was corrected to show its accurate open status. The structured data provided AI systems with a definitive, machine-readable source of truth, enabling them to understand and reference the correct branch information.
This success not only resolved a long-standing AI hallucination but also demonstrated how a compliant, scalable Schema Markup strategy can enhance accuracy, consistency, and trust across AI-driven search experiences.
Results
The partnership delivered measurable and business-critical outcomes for Wells Fargo.
Resolved AI Hallucinations
Within weeks of implementation, AI Overviews stopped citing the outdated 20 year-old article and began referencing Wells Fargo’s accurate, marked-up branch locator pages instead. The structured data provided a trusted, machine-readable source of truth, redirecting AI systems toward the brand’s verified information.
Schema Markup ensured that AI and search engines consistently referenced current, approved information. While the outdated content still existed online, AI systems began prioritizing the organization’s authoritative pages, reducing regulatory risk and reinforcing customer confidence in their brand.
Expanded Visibility Across Search
Following the success of the branch locator pages, other lines of business also began to see benefits from implementing Schema Markup at scale.
Home loan and product pages gained stronger representation in both AI Overviews and traditional organic search, extending Wells Fargo’s reach and improving discoverability in emerging AI-powered search experiences.
Scalable Innovation for a Regulated Industry
Schema App’s custom self-hosted solution empowered Wells Fargo to modernize and future-proof its SEO strategy while maintaining the governance, security, and oversight required in a highly regulated environment.
Wells Fargo’s SEO leaders highlighted Schema App’s responsiveness, flexibility, and deep understanding of enterprise requirements:
We didn’t know how to fix the AI Overview hallucination problem, but Schema App helped us solve it. AI Overviews went from citing a decades-old news article to referencing our accurate branch locator pages within weeks. That’s a huge win.”
Not only did Schema App help us get better organic search performance, but they also understood our unique challenges as a regulated industry. The custom solution they built satisfied our compliance and security requirements. Their patience, adaptability, and partnership are unmatched.”
Conclusion
For Wells Fargo, accuracy in search isn’t just about rankings — it’s about safeguarding regulatory compliance, customer trust, and brand authority in a YMYL industry. By partnering with Schema App, Wells Fargo successfully navigated the challenges of AI Overviews, ensuring its customers find accurate and trustworthy information across search experiences.
Schema App continues to serve as an extension of Wells Fargo’s enterprise SEO team, helping them adapt to the evolving search landscape while meeting the strictest industry requirements.
SEO leader
Wells Fargo
Not only did Schema App help us get better organic search performance, but they also understood our unique challenges as a regulated industry. The custom solution they built satisfied our compliance and security requirements. Their patience, adaptability, and partnership are unmatched.