Google still rewards 14 structured data types with rich results in 2026: Article, Breadcrumb, Product (with MerchantListing and ProductVariants), Recipe, Event, LocalBusiness, JobPosting, Video, Organization, Speakable, Return Policy, Shipping Policy, Loyalty Program, and Carousel. Eight types are dead or so restricted they're not worth shipping: Book Actions, Course Info, ClaimReview, Estimated Salary, Learning Video, Special Announcement, Vehicle Listing, and FAQPage (fully sunset May 7, 2026). How-to has been off the table for general sites since 2023.
I read every structured-data doc Google publishes. Twice. The version of this list that most agencies sell, every type that ever existed in schema.org's vocabulary, is wrong. The real list shrank, and it keeps shrinking. The reason matters more than the names: Google is intentionally simplifying the SERP, and "we'll mark it up just in case" is now a bad bet.
The 8 types Google retired (or restricted into irrelevance)
On June 12, 2025, Henry Hsu at Google announced the phase-out of seven structured data types: Book Actions, Course Info, Claim Review, Estimated Salary, Learning Video, Special Announcement, and Vehicle Listing. Search Console reporting dropped September 9, 2025. The API stopped supporting them January 2026.
A few months later, John Mueller followed up in November 2025 confirming the simplification was a programme, not a one-off. Then on May 7, 2026, FAQ rich results, already restricted to government and health sites since 2023, were fully sunset. Practice Problems is gone too; that URL now 301s to the deprecation changelog.
The list, with what to do about each:
- Book Actions: dead. Don't add it. If a publishing client already has it, leave it; it does no harm.
- Course Info: dead. The carousel-style Course List is still alive (different schema, see below). Don't conflate the two.
- ClaimReview / FactCheck: alive only for verified fact-check publishers approved by Google, so for a normal site it's pointless.
- Estimated Salary: dead.
- Learning Video: dead, though generic VideoObject is still active.
- Special Announcement: dead. Built for COVID-era banners, never recovered.
- Vehicle Listing: dead.
- FAQPage: fully sunset May 7, 2026. The docs warn this explicitly: rich results stopped appearing on that date, the Rich Results Test loses support in June 2026, and the API drops it in August.
How-to was severely restricted to mobile, then removed from general eligibility in 2023. Most sites have not earned a how-to rich result in years. The Sitelinks Searchbox markup was sunset in 2024, and Google now generates sitelinks automatically.
> Google's phase-out post was blunt: "This update won't affect how pages are ranked." Removing these types didn't penalise anyone. It just stopped rewarding them.
If your old SEO checklist still tells you to add FAQ schema to every page, throw the checklist out.
What still earns a rich result in 2026
Here's the working set. These are the structured-data types Google still surfaces with enhanced display, and the ones worth the engineering time on a small-business site.
Content and editorial
- Article: for blog posts, news, and editorial pages. Use NewsArticle for news, BlogPosting for opinion, plain Article for everything else. Author byline, datePublished, dateModified, headline, image: keep them complete.
- Breadcrumb: boring but high-impact. Improves how URLs render in Search and feeds AI extractors a clean hierarchy. Every page in a site with structure should have it.
- Organization: one per site, on the homepage. Logo, sameAs (social profiles), founder, contact. This is the canonical entity card Google uses to identify your business.
- Speakable: marks passages for voice readers like Assistant. Niche but useful if you publish anything news-shaped.
Commerce
- Product with Offer: the foundation for every PDP. Price, availability, condition, GTIN, brand.
- MerchantListing: for shopping experiences, requires Merchant Center linking. It used to be optional, and now it's the bar.
- ProductVariants: replaces the old one-page-per-SKU pattern. If you sell variants, ship this.
- Return Policy and Shipping Policy: nested into Offer or declared at the Organization level. These show as trust signals next to your product cards.
- Loyalty Program (MemberProgram): added in 2025. Displays member pricing and points in the knowledge panel.
Local, events, jobs, recipes
- LocalBusiness: for any business with a physical location. NAP (name, address, phone), opening hours, geo coordinates, priceRange. Subtypes like Restaurant, Dentist, and AutoRepair plug in extra fields. We use this on every site we ship for dentists and restaurants, the two verticals where rich-result coverage is the largest single conversion lever.
- Event: for live events with dates and venues. One Event item per event, not one per calendar.
- JobPosting: for hiring pages. Salary and applicantLocationRequirements increase match quality.
- Recipe: still one of Google's strongest rich results. Ingredients, instructions, prepTime, cookTime, image, nutrition, aggregateRating.
- Video (VideoObject): thumbnail, duration, contentUrl, uploadDate, with transcripts to boost eligibility.
Other still-active types worth knowing
- Carousel: wraps Recipe, Article, Movie, Course list, or Event into a horizontal carousel, at the site root only.
- Profile Page: for author and contributor pages, useful for binding bylines to identity.
- Discussion Forum and QAPage: for community sites with user-generated content (different from FAQPage, which expects a single author per page).
- Dataset: for Google Dataset Search.
- Image License Metadata: improves image search badging.
That's the full surface. Everything else is either deprecated, restricted to verified publishers, or pure schema.org vocabulary that does nothing for Google Search (it may still help Bing or LLMs, which is a separate decision).
What a clean LocalBusiness markup looks like
For the studio's most common ICP, a single-location small business, this is the minimum that wins:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Dentist",
"name": "Bloor West Family Dental",
"image": "https://example.com/photos/clinic.jpg",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "2293 Bloor St W",
"addressLocality": "Toronto",
"addressRegion": "ON",
"postalCode": "M6S 1N9",
"addressCountry": "CA"
},
"telephone": "+1-416-555-0142",
"url": "https://example.com",
"priceRange": "$$",
"openingHours": "Mo-Fr 08:00-17:00"
}That's it: ten properties. The mistake we see most is the opposite: agencies stuffing in fifteen optional fields, half of them inaccurate, so Google demotes the whole block. Google's own guidance is explicit: better to supply fewer complete and accurate properties than to spray every recommended field at it.
Three rules that govern every rich result
The 14 types share three guidelines that determine whether they render:
- The markup must reflect content visible to the user. If the JSON-LD says you're open until 9pm but the page says 5pm, Google ignores the block. Worse, repeated mismatches can trigger a structured-data manual action, and the page loses rich-result eligibility entirely.
- Required properties are required. Omit one and the type doesn't qualify. Most "why isn't my rich result showing?" tickets resolve to a missing required field.
- Eligibility is not entitlement. Google's docs make this point bluntly: structured data enables a feature, it does not guarantee one. The Search algorithm decides whether to render the rich result based on query, location, device, and a hundred other signals.
> Per Google's general guidelines: "Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page." Hiding markup behind tabs or expandable sections is fine. Marking up content that isn't on the page at all is a manual-action risk.
Why this matters more than it looks
Structured data used to be a SEO power-up. It's now a baseline. Two things changed.
The first is the SERP simplification. Google's stripping out rich-result types that confused users or got abused, so investing in deprecated markup is wasted engineering.
The second is AEO. AI Overviews and AI Mode lift answers from structured data directly. A LocalBusiness block with clean NAP gets read by an AI agent the same way a knowledge-panel API gets read: explicit, typed, unambiguous. The structured-data ROI used to be "more clicks from a richer SERP." It's now also "more citations from AI surfaces," and the cited answer is the bigger prize. For deeper coverage of citation engineering, see how to actually get cited in an AI Overview.
Sources
- Introduction to structured data (Google Search Central)
- General structured data guidelines (Google Search Central)
- Simplifying the search results page (June 2025) (Henry Hsu, Google)
- An update on our efforts (November 2025) (John Mueller, Google)
- FAQ structured data (sunset notice) (Google Search Central)
- LocalBusiness structured data (Google Search Central)
- Loyalty Program (MemberProgram) structured data (Google Search Central)