Google structured data guidelines

Google says that to be eligible for rich result appearance, structured data must not violate its content policies and must follow the general guidelines on its page. This page lists those guidelines, with the wording taken from Google's page.

The guidelines Google documents

Read on 2026-10-07. Google's page showed "Last updated 2026-07-10 UTC". Notes under a quote are close paraphrases of the same page. Individual features (recipes, jobs, products and so on) have their own extra guidelines on Google's feature pages.

Examples

Nesting: Google's example, shortened. Recipe is the main item, with aggregateRating and video nested inside it.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Recipe",
  "name": "Banana Bread Recipe",
  "image": ["https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg", "https://example.com/photos/4x3/photo.jpg", "https://example.com/photos/16x9/photo.jpg"],
  "description": "The best banana bread recipe you'll ever find! Learn how to use up all those extra bananas.",
  "aggregateRating": { "@type": "AggregateRating", "ratingValue": 4.7, "ratingCount": 123 },
  "video": {
    "@type": "VideoObject",
    "name": "How To Make Banana Bread",
    "description": "This is how you make banana bread, in 5 easy steps.",
    "contentUrl": "https://www.example.com/video123.mp4"
  }
}
</script>

Individual items: Google's example, shortened. Two distinct items on one page, a Recipe and a BreadcrumbList.

<script type="application/ld+json">
[{
  "@context": "https://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Recipe",
  "name": "Banana Bread Recipe",
  "description": "The best banana bread recipe you'll ever find! Learn how to use up all those extra bananas.",
  "image": ["https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg", "https://example.com/photos/4x3/photo.jpg", "https://example.com/photos/16x9/photo.jpg"]
}, {
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
  "itemListElement": [
    { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Recipes", "item": "https://example.com/recipes" },
    { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Bread recipes", "item": "https://example.com/recipes/bread-recipes" },
    { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "How To Make Banana Bread" }
  ]
}]
</script>

Build markup with the free schema markup generator, FAQ schema generator, article schema generator or breadcrumb schema generator, then check the syntax with the JSON-LD checker. See also which structured data types Google still supports.

Rules to remember

• Google says not to mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page, and that structured data must be a true representation of the page content.
• Google says items that are missing required properties are not eligible for rich results.
• Google says correct markup does not guarantee a rich result, and that JSON-LD is the recommended format.

The wider rules: Google spam policies. Per-type rules: Google Article structured data, as documented, Google breadcrumb structured data, as documented and Google LocalBusiness structured data, as documented.

More per-type rules: Google review snippet structured data, Google product snippet structured data and Google site names structured data.

Questions

Sources

• General structured data guidelines (Google Search Central), read on 2026-10-07