For Martha van Berkel, CEO and co-founder of Schema App, a two-minute demo at a 2018 conference turned into a long-term collaboration with one of Canada’s largest banks.

“We had two minutes to show a really technical platform,” she said. “TD was also on the panel for the event, so I decided that I would show how Schema App would work on TD’s website.”

A year later, that decision led to Schema App becoming a key digital collaborator for TD, now the startup’s biggest Canadian customer. The bank has made Schema App a key part of its digital strategy to stay discoverable and accurate in the age of AI-powered search.

The Guelph-based company specializes in structured data, aka schema markup, to help websites communicate clearly with search engines and AI tools.

“We translate websites to be understood by search and also AI, and allow them to be very agile and innovative in the search landscape,” said van Berkel. “By working together, TD is leading in North America with regard to how their website and data are being read and understood by search and AI.”

Why search is getting harder (and faster)

People aren’t just going to Google anymore. They’re asking ChatGPT for recommendations, talking to Alexa in their kitchen, and using tools like Perplexity AI to get quick answers. Sometimes, they don’t even make it to a website.

“I’ve worked in tech for 25 years,” van Berkel said, “I’ve never seen it move this fast.”

Schema App is helping TD stay visible in that changing space, especially in emerging features like Google’s AI Overviews.

“As people now go into AI Overviews, TD is showing up and able to be represented in those results,” she said.

And in a world of AI hallucinations, accuracy matters.

“As more of us turn to AI-powered tools for answers, it’s critical that our customers can still find clear, accurate information from TD,” said Akif Unal, Vice President of Growth Marketing at TD. “Making our digital content easier for both search engines and AI tools to understand is an important part of how we continue to meet the expectations of a digital-first world, deliver reliable information and a great digital experience, and delight our customers.”

How a local startup landed a national win

Schema App’s relationship with TD is as much about timing and trust as it is about tech.

“They’re our biggest Canadian customer. TD is leading the pack in the banking industry here,” van Berkel said.

The collaboration is especially meaningful because the team at Schema App rarely gets to see its work up close.

“There’s nothing like the joy of being in your home country, seeing your customers front and centre,” said van Berkel.

van Berkel’s startup journey began with local support from programs at Communitech.

“Fierce Founders was really where I would say we felt part of the tech ecosystem in a more meaningful way,” she said. “It was interesting because I had grown up in enterprise, but we needed the community.”

Schema App participated in the Fierce Founders bootcamp in 2017 and joined Communitech’s Rev accelerator in 2018, a now-retired program focused on helping startups scale revenue through structured sales support. Today, van Berkel is also part of Communitech’s CEO peer group for scale-ups.

Schema App is fully bootstrapped, works with more than 90 enterprise customers, and employs 38 people from coast to coast. 

The Kevin Bacon theory of AI search

To explain how Schema App helps organizations show up accurately in search and AI tools, van Berkel pulled up a slide she often uses in keynotes and pitches. It was her personal knowledge graph; a web of connected facts that show how machines can understand people, places and things by defining their relationships.

“I’m the CEO and co-founder of Schema App, I went to Queen’s and MIT, I used to work at Cisco, and I used to drive a 1965 Austin-Healey Sprite,” she said. “That car was in the movie Losing Chase, which was directed by Kevin Bacon. So, what you have just done is you have inferred that you can win the Kevin Bacon game because you understand how I’m connected to my car. My car is connected to the movie, and Kevin Bacon is connected to the movie.”

That layered relationship is a quirky anecdote, but also a model for how Schema App structures data so machines can infer meaning and context.

“When we do schema markup for companies, it explains how all the dots are connected so the machines can make that inference correctly and so they can show up where they want to show up in search and AI.”

van Berkel has written about the story in a blog, where she says brands need to manage their online presence the same way, by defining the important entities and explicitly connecting them in a machine-readable way. Schema markup, she says, is how organizations can reclaim control over how their brand is understood and represented in what she calls the “machine channel.”

What’s next for Schema App

Beyond search, Schema App is already helping clients optimize their content and get data ready for internal AI projects.

“We empower Enterprise digital marketers to be the heroes,” van Berkel said. “They may start doing this for search engine optimization, but it actually will enable content teams and AI teams to accelerate their road map.”

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