Schema Markup: The Structured Data Guide to the Rich Results Google Still Shows

A label on the jar: what structured data tells Google

A person reading a bakery's page knows that "Sat 7 to 2" means opening hours and that "$4.50" is the price of a croissant. A program has to guess. Structured data removes the guess. Google defines it as "a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content." In practice it is a block of code that says, in labeled fields, this is a bakery, here is its address, these are its hours.

The labels come from schema.org, a shared vocabulary founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex, which is why people say "schema markup" and "structured data" as if they were the same thing. Strictly, schema.org is the dictionary and structured data is what you write with it. Google reads three formats, all acceptable when valid: JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa.

• JSON-LD is a script block that sits apart from the visible text, in the head or the body. Google recommends it because it is the easiest to set up and maintain at scale.
• Microdata is a set of attributes added to the visible HTML itself, wrapped around the text it describes.
• RDFa is a similar set of HTML5 attributes, used in the head and body; some older CMS themes still emit it.
• The anatomy of a JSON-LD block: an @context line pointing at schema.org, an @type such as "Bakery", and then properties like name, address, telephone and openingHoursSpecification, each holding a value.

Pick JSON-LD unless a platform forces otherwise. It keeps the markup in one place, so a developer can change it without touching the page design, and a template can print it on every product or location page at once. Our guide to on-page SEO shows where markup fits among the other elements of a single page.

Stars, prices and dates: what a rich result is worth

A rich result is a search listing with something extra drawn from markup: review stars, a price and availability, an event date and venue, a breadcrumb trail, a video thumbnail with key moments. The extra lines take up more of the screen and answer a question before the click, which is the whole appeal.

Google publishes case studies to make the point. On its structured data introduction it reports that Rotten Tomatoes measured a 25% higher click-through rate on 100,000 pages with markup, that Food Network saw a 35% increase in visits after enabling search features on 80% of its pages, and that Nestlé found pages shown as rich results had an 82% higher click-through rate. These are large brands, chosen by the company that runs the results page, about a feature it wants you to adopt. Read them as proof that rich results can move clicks, not as a forecast for a plumbing site.

Rich results change the click, not the rank. Markup does not move a page up the list by itself, which is why the payoff shows in click-through rate rather than in position. Google's guide to how search engines work explains the ranking half separately.

The rich results Google still shows, as of October 2026

Google's search gallery lists the structured data features it currently supports. Most are built for publishers, job boards, recipe sites and stores. These are the ones a local business or small online shop is most likely to use, with the requirements Google lists for each.

Two neighbors sit just outside rich results. Organization markup on the home page helps Google identify the business and can influence the logo shown in results and the knowledge panel. WebSite markup on the home page is the strongest way to tell Google your preferred site name, which matters for title tags. Neither produces stars, but both are worth the ten minutes. Store owners should read product page SEO for the Product details.

The graveyard: FAQ, How-to and the features Google retired

Rich results are not permanent. Google adds and removes them as it redesigns the results page, and the markup sitting in your templates does not get a notice. The recent obituaries, all from Google's documentation changelog:

• FAQ rich results: limited to well-known government and health sites in September 2023, then removed from Search entirely starting May 7, 2026. Google deleted the documentation on June 15, 2026.
• How-to rich results: no longer shown; Google removed the documentation in September 2023.
• Six types phased out in 2025: Google announced on June 12, 2025 that Course Info, Claim Review, Estimated Salary, Learning Video, Special Announcement and Vehicle Listing would stop being supported in Search, and dropped them from Search Console reports and the Rich Results Test on September 9, 2025.
• Book Actions: on the same June list, then reprieved; in November 2025 Google removed the deprecation banner because the markup is still used in Search.
• Practice problems: documentation removed in January 2026; the feature is no longer shown.

Google said of the 2025 removals that the change "won't affect how pages are ranked," and that use of these types outside Google Search is not affected. So nothing breaks when a rich result dies. The page simply loses the extra lines, and the owner who paid for FAQ markup last spring loses the reason he paid.

Review stars: the rule most plugins break

Stars are the rich result owners want most, and the one they most often mark up against the rules. Google's review snippet guidelines are specific: if the business being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, its pages using LocalBusiness or any other Organization markup are ineligible for the star feature. That includes testimonials pulled onto your own site through an embedded third-party widget.

Google also asks sites not to include fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews, recommends accepting only ratings that come with a comment and an author's name, and warns against using more than one way to indicate what is being reviewed. A local business earns its stars in the Business Profile, not in markup; our guide to getting more Google reviews covers that, and showing up in Google Maps covers the rest of the map side.

Eligibility rules that sit above every type

Each feature has its own page of properties, but Google's general structured data guidelines apply to all of them. Markup that breaks them can be ignored, or flagged as spam.

• Visible: do not mark up content that readers of the page cannot see.
• Relevant: the markup must represent the page. Google's examples are a woodworking site labeling instructions as recipes and a streaming site labeling broadcasts as local events.
• Complete: items missing a required property are not eligible; recommended properties improve the result.
• In the right place: markup goes on the page it describes, and duplicate versions of a page should carry the same markup.
• Specific: use the most specific type that applies, such as Dentist rather than LocalBusiness.
• Crawlable: do not block marked-up pages with robots.txt or noindex, and keep marked-up images crawlable and indexable.

Cross the line deliberately and Google may issue a structured data manual action. Google says it removes eligibility for rich results and does not affect how the page ranks in web search, but it shows up in Search Console's Manual actions report, and unwinding it takes a cleanup and a reconsideration request. The broader rules are in our guide to white hat SEO.

Testing markup before launch and watching it afterward

1. 1

   Test the live URL, not a pasted snippet

   Run the page through Google's Rich Results Test. Google advises entering the URL rather than code, and the default crawler is a smartphone, which is the version Google indexes.

2. 2

   Read which features were found

   The test lists each rich result type it detected and marks problems. Errors on required properties block eligibility; warnings on recommended ones do not.

3. 3

   Validate the rest of the vocabulary

   The Rich Results Test checks only Google's supported features. For other schema.org types, use the Schema Markup Validator.

4. 4

   Confirm Google saw it

   After launch, run URL Inspection in Google Search Console to see whether Google found the markup on the crawled page.

5. 5

   Watch the rich result reports

   Under Enhancements (or Shopping, for products), each supported type gets a report of valid and invalid items. Counts are items, not pages, and the examples are a sample capped at 1,000 rows.

6. 6

   Measure the change

   Google suggests marking up a few pages first, then comparing them before and after in the Performance report, filtered by URL.

Markup generated by JavaScript or Google Tag Manager works: Google processes structured data that is in the rendered page. Google warns that for Product markup it can make Shopping crawls less frequent and less reliable, and that values hardcoded in Tag Manager drift out of step with the page. Print the markup in the server's HTML where you can; our guide to JavaScript SEO explains why, and technical SEO covers the rest of the delivery check.

Plugin, developer or neither: who should write the code

On WordPress, an SEO plugin will add Organization, WebSite, Article and BreadcrumbList markup with a few settings, and it does a fair job. The trouble starts when a theme, a review widget and a second plugin each add their own blocks, and the page ends up describing two businesses with different phone numbers. Open the Rich Results Test after every plugin install and keep one source of truth.

The free site audit checks SEO, speed signals, mobile, security and content and emails a report with fixes. On sites DataCram builds, markup is generated in code from the same content as the page, and Iris, the Athena CMS agent for titles, descriptions and structured data, drafts updates for approval. If you would rather hand the whole job over, structured data is part of every SEO program. For voice assistants, our page on voice search schema covers the overlap, and meta tags covers the rest of the code in the head. The full reading order is on the SEO guide front page.