Google has retired or restricted several rich result types over recent years, and a good deal of advice online still recommends implementing markup for enhancements that no longer display. Here is a current view.
#Still reliably displayed
Product — price, availability and star ratings in search results and Shopping. Requires name, offers with price and priceCurrency, and image. aggregateRating produces stars, but only where genuine visible reviews exist.
Review snippet — star ratings for products, books, recipes, software and local businesses. Must reflect reviews actually visible on the page.
Breadcrumb — replaces the raw URL beneath your result with a readable hierarchy. Cheap to implement, reliably shown, and worth adding to every page in a hierarchy.
Recipe — one of the richest remaining enhancements, with image, rating, cook time and calories, plus eligibility for recipe carousels.
Event — dates, venue and ticket links, and inclusion in event experiences in Search and Maps.
Video — thumbnails, duration and key moments. Increasingly important as video surfaces expand.
Local business — hours, phone, ratings and map presence.
Job posting — for career pages, drives inclusion in Google's job search experience.
Sitelinks search box — a search field within your result for qualifying sites.
Organization — logo, name and contact details in knowledge panels. Not a visual "rich result" as such, but important for brand entity recognition.
#Restricted or deprecated
FAQ — restricted in 2023 to well-known authoritative government and health sites. For everyone else, the visual snippet no longer appears. The markup remains valid and still helps machines parse the page, but do not build a content strategy expecting the enhancement.
HowTo — deprecated for most surfaces. The same reasoning applies: valid markup, no visual result.
Q&A — narrowed substantially, applying mainly to genuine community Q&A platforms.
#Worth implementing even without a visual result
This is the part most advice misses.
Structured data now serves a second audience: AI search systems and assistants that parse it to understand entities, relationships and attributes. As generated answers become a larger share of how people find information, being correctly and unambiguously described matters more, not less.
Article, Organization, Person and BreadcrumbList markup all contribute to that even where no visual snippet results. They cost almost nothing to add if generated from templates.
Article/BlogPosting in particular is worth implementing everywhere. It establishes author, publication date, publisher and section — the entity relationships that support how content is attributed and surfaced.
Person markup on author pages, linked from articles via the author property, associates content with a named individual and their credentials.
#Priorities by site type
Content and publishing: Article, Organization, Person, BreadcrumbList. Add VideoObject where you have video.
E-commerce: Product with complete offers, Review, BreadcrumbList, Organization. This is where rich results have the largest measurable effect on click-through.
Local business: LocalBusiness with the most specific applicable subtype, complete address, geo coordinates and openingHours. Then Review.
SaaS and software: SoftwareApplication, Organization, Article for the blog, BreadcrumbList. FAQPage on pricing and documentation pages for machine parsing.
Events and ticketing: Event with complete location and offers.
#The eligibility caveat
Valid markup makes a page eligible for a rich result. It does not guarantee one. Google decides based on query, device, competition, site quality and its own assessment of whether the enhancement helps.
Sites with a history of policy violations, thin content or spam signals may see rich results withheld despite technically perfect markup. Structured data is a prerequisite, not a lever.
#Getting it right
Use the schema markup generator to build and validate the shape for each page type, then implement it as a template that serialises from your real page data. Hand-written markup drifts out of sync within weeks.
Then validate with the Rich Results Test before deploying, and monitor Search Console Enhancements after.
#What not to do
Do not mark up content that is not on the page. The most common cause of manual actions.
Do not add aggregateRating without visible reviews. Self-serving ratings are explicitly against policy and are actively enforced.
Do not implement every type you can. Markup describing entities that are not genuinely the subject of the page degrades trust in your structured data overall.
Do not treat it as a ranking tactic. Structured data is not a ranking factor. It affects presentation, and presentation affects click-through rate — which is a real benefit, just not the one it is often sold as.
Frequently asked questions
Does FAQ schema still work in 2026?
The visual FAQ rich result is restricted to authoritative government and health sites. The markup remains valid, still helps machines parse your content, and costs nothing — but expect no visual enhancement.
Which schema type gives the biggest traffic benefit?
For e-commerce, Product with complete offers and genuine review ratings. For most other sites, Breadcrumb is the highest ratio of benefit to effort because it is reliably displayed and trivial to implement.
Does structured data help with AI search?
It appears to help machine systems understand entities, attributes and relationships on a page. Article, Organization and Person markup are worth implementing for that reason even where no visual rich result exists.