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By Sergio Alonzo Piña··7 min read

Which rich results still exist (and how to earn them)

Google retired many rich results. These are the ones that still show, the schema each one needs, and how to add JSON-LD without breaking your site.

Most of the rich results people still chase no longer exist. Google retired HowTo results, restricted FAQ results to a handful of institutional sites, and dropped the sitelinks search box entirely. What still earns visible space in the results is a much shorter list — products, reviews, breadcrumbs, video, recipes, events, job postings and local business details — and each one needs a specific schema type to qualify. You can build the JSON-LD for the common ones with the structured data generator in a couple of minutes. The rule that governs all of it: markup buys eligibility, not the result itself.

What Google retired, and when

The last few years have been a steady contraction of search features, not an expansion. Three changes account for most of the confusion in old SEO checklists:

  • FAQ rich results (August 2023). Narrowed to well-known, authoritative government and health websites. Everyone else kept valid FAQPage markup and lost the dropdown.
  • HowTo rich results (2023). Removed outright. The type still validates, but it produces no visual treatment in Google search.
  • Sitelinks search box (late 2024). Retired, along with the WebSite + SearchAction markup that fed it. That snippet is now dead weight in a lot of templates.

If a guide tells you to add FAQ schema to "take up more SERP space" or to add a SearchAction block, it was written before these changes and the rest of its advice deserves the same suspicion. Meanwhile, the additions have been narrow and vertical-specific: discussion forum and profile page markup for community sites, vehicle listings, course info. Useful if you run that kind of site, irrelevant otherwise.

The rich results that still show

Sorted roughly by how much visible payoff they deliver for the effort.

Product snippets — Product with Offer

Price, currency, availability and aggregate rating can appear directly under your result. This is the highest-value markup left, and also the most policed. The price in the JSON-LD must match the price the visitor sees, the currency must be explicit, and ratings must come from real reviews that are visible on the page.

Review snippets — AggregateRating or Review

The star rating shown next to products, recipes, books, software and local businesses. It cannot be self-serving: a business rating its own products, or a rating stored in markup but nowhere in the HTML, is exactly what the structured data spam policies target.

Breadcrumbs — BreadcrumbList

Replaces the raw URL in the result with a readable path. Low effort, near-universal support, no downside. It also nudges you into keeping a consistent URL hierarchy, which pairs with writing clean, readable slugs in the first place.

Video — VideoObject

Thumbnail, duration and key moments in the results and in the Video tab. Worth it if video is genuinely part of the page rather than a decorative embed.

Recipes, events and job postings

Three verticals where the rich result is still strong and, in the case of events and job postings, where the markup is effectively the entry ticket to a dedicated search experience. Highly specific: if you do not publish recipes, events or jobs, skip them.

Local business — LocalBusiness

Name, address, phone, opening hours and geo coordinates. It rarely produces a dramatic snippet on its own, but it reinforces entity consistency across your site, your Business Profile and third-party citations. The details must match everywhere — a mismatched address does more damage than no markup at all.

Article — Article / NewsArticle

No standalone rich result in ordinary web search, but it is the foundation for Top Stories and Discover treatments, and it is how you state authorship and last-modified dates in a form machines do not have to guess at. Cheap to add, sensible to keep.

Eligibility is not a guarantee

This is the part most guides skip. Valid markup means your page qualifiesfor a feature. Whether the feature actually renders depends on the query, the device, the quality of the page and Google's own judgement — and it can appear one week and vanish the next without anything changing on your side.

So treat a missing rich result as a maybe, not a bug. Validate the markup, confirm eligibility in the Rich Results Test, then stop tuning. The same logic applies one layer up: Google frequently rewrites the title and description it shows, which you can sanity-check with a SERP preview tool before you publish, but never fully control.

Adding JSON-LD without breaking anything

JSON-LD lives in its own script block. It can sit in the <head> or the <body>, and it never touches your visible HTML — which is precisely why it survives redesigns that shred microdata attributes:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "The exact product name on the page",
  "image": "https://example.com/product.jpg",
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "price": "49.00",
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock"
  }
}
</script>

Four rules cover almost every mistake worth avoiding:

  • One block per entity. Separate scripts for Article, BreadcrumbList and Organization are easier to debug than one giant object, and you can remove one without touching the others.
  • Never mark up what the visitor cannot see. Hidden prices, ratings and Q&A are the fastest route to a manual action.
  • ISO 8601 dates, absolute URLs, canonical host. If your canonical uses www, so should every URL inside the markup.
  • Generate it from your data. Hand-written JSON-LD goes stale the moment a price or a date changes. If your CMS can populate it, let it.

One prerequisite that gets skipped: none of this matters if the page cannot be crawled. Check that robots.txt is not blocking the path and that the URL appears in your XML sitemap before you spend an afternoon on schema.

What is not worth marking up

  • HowTo, if you are starting from zero and targeting Google.
  • WebSite + SearchAction for the sitelinks search box — the feature is gone.
  • Deep type hierarchies nobody consumes. There is no bonus for using the most specific subtype available.
  • Boilerplate Organization repeated on 5,000 pages with identical values. Once, on the pages where it means something, is enough.

Validate in two places

The Rich Results Test answers "is this page eligible for a Google feature?". The Schema Markup Validatorat schema.org answers "is this valid schema?", including types Google ignores. After publishing, Search Console's enhancement reports are the only source that reflects what Google actually parsed on crawled pages — warnings mean missing recommended properties and do not block eligibility; errors do.

Frequently asked questions

Does structured data improve rankings?

It is not a ranking factor. Structured data makes a page eligible for specific search features and describes the page in a machine-readable way. A thin page does not rank better because it has JSON-LD, but a good page can win more space in the results.

Why did my FAQ rich result disappear?

Google narrowed FAQ rich results in August 2023 so they only show for a small set of well-known, authoritative government and health sites. Nothing is broken in your markup; the feature simply no longer applies to most sites. The FAQPage type is still valid schema, it just will not render a dropdown for you.

Is HowTo schema worth adding in 2026?

Not if your goal is a visible search feature. Google retired HowTo rich results in 2023 and they no longer appear. The vocabulary is still valid and other consumers may read it, so keeping existing markup costs nothing, but adding it from scratch for Google visibility will not pay off.

How long until a rich result appears after I add markup?

Google has to recrawl and reprocess the page first, which can take days or weeks depending on how often the URL is crawled. Requesting indexing in Search Console can speed up the first check. If the page is eligible and the feature still does not show after several weeks, the likely answer is that Google chose not to display it for that query.

Can invalid markup hurt my site?

Syntax errors mostly just make you ineligible for the feature. What genuinely hurts is marking up content the visitor cannot see, such as prices, ratings or reviews that are not on the page. That falls under the structured data spam policies and can trigger a manual action that removes rich results across the whole site.

Which validator should I use?

Use both, because they answer different questions. Google's Rich Results Test tells you whether the page qualifies for a Google search feature. The Schema Markup Validator at schema.org checks syntax and vocabulary even for types Google does not support. After publishing, the Search Console enhancement reports show real errors on crawled pages.

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