Rich Results Status

What are rich search results?

Rich results are designed to highlight key information and help search engines understand a page’s purpose as accurately as possible. This means less guesswork for Google and more relevant results for users.Rich results are made up of rich snippets and new rich cards –offering more image space and a carousel feature. 

To make the most of rich results for your site, you’ll need to tag up: 

• breadcrumb navigation 
• corporate contact information and logos
• sequential carousels 
• search boxes and social profile information to be displayed in results 

Individual content types can also be tagged up, including: 

• news and blog articles 
• books 
• big data sets 
• training courses 
• events 
• jobs and occupations 
• local business details (including contact information and opening times) 
• product information (including pricing, stock and reviews) 
• fact check confirmation 
• media such as music, podcasts, videos and TV and movie information 

Rich result status reports

Rich result reports for your site are listed under Enhancements in the menu pane. There is a separate report for each rich result type. You will see a rich result report only if:

• Google finds rich results of that type in your property
• The type is a supported rich result type listed below.

If you have implemented a supported type and you don’t see the report in your property, see Missing rich results.

Search Console provides reports for the following rich result types:

• Breadcrumb
• Dataset
• Event
• FAQ
• Fact check
• Guided recipe
• How-to
• Image License
• Job posting
• Logo
• Product
• Q&A page
• Recipe
• Review snippet
• Sitelinks searchbox
• Special Announcement
• Video

Using the report

Open the appropriate report from the navigation panel in Search Console.

The report consists of a summary page and a details page:

1. The summary page shows a chart of errors, warnings, and valid items on your site over time, and a table showing status + description category combinations that shows how many structured data items currently fall in each category.
2. Click a row in the summary page table to see details about items in that category.

What to look for

Ideally your current error count should be 0. Current error, warning, and valid counts are shown at the top of the chart on all pages in the report.

If you find errors, handle them as described in the Troubleshooting section.

If you find warnings, they do not disqualify your rich results from being shown in Google Search with special features, but they can provide a somewhat reduced experience for your users. Debug warnings as described in the Troubleshooting section.

Summary page

In the graph, an item is assigned the most severe status that affects it: so an item with both an error and a warning is assigned the status “Error”. An item is counted only once in the graph. In the table, issue status is assigned to a specific item property (not to the entire item), so a structured data item can appear multiple times in the table.

The following statuses apply:

• Error: The rich result cannot appear in Google Search as a rich result. Items in error state have at least one error, and can also have one or more warnings.
• Valid with warnings: The rich result is eligible to appear in Google Search as a rich result. Warning issues are either suggestions for missing or invalid optional values, errors in non-critical properties, or warnings about usage of deprecated properties. Providing more optional properties in your structured data can often enable a better experience for the user.
• Valid: The rich result is eligible to appear in Google Search as a rich result. All required and optional data is correctly provided.

If you want to see all issues for a single rich result, see Inspecting errors.

Issue details page

Select an issue row in the summary page table to open a page showing details for the selected issue. An issue can affect rich results on different pages, multiple rich results on a single page, or a single rich result multiple times.

The issue details page contains the following information:

State: Validation state of this issue. 

First detected: The date when this issue was first detected on your site. Note: If all issues of this type are resolved, but a new instance of this issue appears within 90 days, the date will be original first detected date, not the date of the new instance.

Examples: A list of rich results affected by this issue. Note that it’s possible that the examples list might omit rows for various reasons, such as issue instances that happened after the last crawl of your site, or instances that affect more than 1,000 items (the table is limited to 1,000 rows).

Item type: The name value in the item’s structured data.

Last crawled: The last time the page containing this issue was crawled.

To see more information about an issue on a specific page, select the issue in the examples table. 

Click the inspect icon Search next to the URL in the table to run the URL Inspection tool, which offers error details, indexed and live test results, and a screenshot.

Inspecting errors

You can use several different tools to inspect your structured data errors:

• In the error details page:
  • Click a URL in the table to see the structured data code.
  • Click the inspect icon next to the URL in the table to run the URL Inspection tool, which offers error details, indexed and live test results, and a screenshot.
• Use the Rich Results Test tool to test your page, or to iteratively test, modify, and retest your code directly in the browser. Either submit the URL of the page to test, or copy and paste code into the tool.

Troubleshooting

Here is a basic process for prioritizing and fixing rich result issues on your site:

1. On the summary page of a rich result report, filter out the warnings and valid items and focus on the errors first.
2. Fix errors according to the number of affected pages:
   • If there is a spike in the error chart, look for a corresponding spike in the error rows in the table
   • Fix the issue on your site, test your fix, and ensure that your fixes are live on the web. See Inspecting errors to learn about the different tools to view and troubleshoot your structured data items.
   • Return to the issue details page and click the Validate Fix button to begin the validation process. This process can take several days, and you will receive email notifications of the progress.
   • If all instances of that issue are found to be fixed (that is, the fix is validated), the count of pages affected by that issue will become 0 and the issue status will be updated.
3. Continue fixing errors.
4. When all errors have been fixed, remove the filter for warnings, and consider fixing the warnings. Most warnings are about missing optional properties in your structured data. Having more information in rich result can be more useful to your site visitors.

Useful troubleshooting resources:

Structured data documentation

Rich Results test

Sharing the report

You can share issue details in the coverage or enhancement reports by clicking the Share  button on the page. This link grants access only to the current issue details page, plus any validation history pages for this issue, to anyone with the link. It does not grant access to other pages for your resource, or enable the shared user to perform any actions on your property or account. You can revoke the link at any time by disabling sharing for this page.

Exporting report data

Many reports provide an export button  to export the report data. Both chart and table data are exported. Values shown as either ~ or – in the report (not available/not a number) will be zeros in the downloaded data.