Structured Data - Change History & Alerts

Adding support for GS1 Digital Link and a few smaller updates:

• Added new property hasGS1DigitalLink for use on Product, Offer, Organization and Place to allow the specification of GS1 digital links.
  
• Added new property certificationRating for use on Certification to allow the specification of a certification rating with a scale.
• Add existing property acceptedPaymentMethod for use on Organization to allow the specification of the payment method(s) a business accepts.
• Add build-time spell checks using codespell.

Google updated their documentation for the Video rich result to remove details of the 'Video host carousel', which was a limited access feature that Google decided 'wasn't useful for the ecosystem at scale.'

Google clarify that there is no harm in leaving the markup on your pages, even though the SERP feature has been removed.

Google updated the Product structured data documentation by adding new 3DModel markup support for merchant listings, allowing site owners to link a 3D model to a specific product (on pages with multiple products).

Google updated the Recipe rich result documentation by removing the section on 'Guided Recipes', which was a Google Assistant feature that has now been deprecated. Previously, recipeIngredient and recipeInstructions were required properties for Guided Recipes but only recommended properties for Google Search, so the documentation now also reflects that these are just recommended properties.

This is a brand new carousel rich result that's in beta, which is a list-like rich result that people can scroll horizontally to see more entities from a given site (also known as a host carousel). Each tile in the carousel may have information from your site about the price, rating, and images for entities on the page.

To be eligible for this beta rich result, you need to add ItemList structured data in combination with at least one one of the following supported structured data items:

• LocalBusiness (and its subtypes, e.g. Restaurant or Hotel)
• Product
• Event

This is a brand new rich result designed to better support product variant scenarios for ecommerce sites. They also added a new isVariantOf property to the product structured data documentation and clarified that Google support product variants with distinct URLs. The purpose of this update is to enhance the support offered to e-commerce websites in managing product variants.

Recognizing the complexity and significance of product variants for e-commerce, particularly in categories such as apparel and electronics, Google is providing expanded examples and guidance on implementation of product variant structured data.

Google updated the Merchant listings return policy documentation, clarifying when to use FreeReturn versus ReturnShippingFees as value for returnFees for product returns, in order to better support more granular shipping and return fee scenarios.

Restoring Physician subtype of MedicalBusiness:

• Clarifying that PhysiciansOffice is a subtype of MedicalBusiness.

Added support for Certifications and a few smaller updates:

• Added Certification to allow the specification of certifications for places, organizations, products, and persons. Compatible with gs1:CertificationDetails.
  
• Added colorSwatch.
  
• Added KeepProduct for ReturnMethodEnumeration.
  

Added vocabulary for describing types of digital sources (in collaboration with IPTC), and clarifying subtypes of Physician:

• Added IndividualPhysician, PhysiciansOffice as subtypes of Physician to clarify the longstanding ambiguity between these two different interpretations of the Physician type. Amended occupationalCategory to be applicable here and added usNPI for use with NPI identifiers in the US.
  
• To help address situations around the responsible use of generative AI, we add a "digital source type" vocabulary based on IPTC's definitions. This consists of a property digitalSourceType, an enumeration type IPTCDigitalSourceEnumeration, and a set of 14 coded values such as TrainedAlgorithmicMediaDigitalSource mapping directly to the IPTC list.
  

Google amended the documentation for the Product search feature, adding support for the suggestedAge property as an alternative to suggestedMaxAge and suggestedMinAge, and clarified the list of possible values for age ranges.

This is in order to make it easier and more flexible for people to specify age ranges for a product (Also, the previous wording was confusing and didn't map well to the Merchant Center documentation about product age ranges).

Google updated the Discussion Forum and Q&A page documentation to explicitly clarify that author URLs are recommended.

Google updated the Organization documentation to explain that telephone and email can be specified at the Organization level besides contactPoint.

This is a brand new rich result designed for sites that list holiday rental inventory. When you add structured data to your vacation rental listing pages, this means that users can see listing information in the search results; such as the name, description, images, location, rating, reviews and more.

Note: This feature is limited to sites that meet certain eligibility criteria and additional steps are required to complete the integration. To learn more about how to list your vacation rentals on Google, visit the integration starter guide.

Google removed the Logo documentation for the Search Gallery, and have merged this into a new rich result, Organization, which also includes more organizational information (such as contact info, legal name, and business identifiers).

The documentation for the Q&A rich result has had a significant update, with six recommended properties added to both Question and Answer. Additionally, the Comment type has been added, which can optionally be used to describe clarifications or discussions about the question or answer which are neither question nor answer (define Comments inside the Question or Answer, as values for the comment property).

Previously, the only recommended properties for Question were text and upvoteCount, and the only recommended properties for Answer were url and upvoteCount.

These are the new recommended properties that have been added to both Question and Answer:

• author
• comment
• dateModified
• datePublished
• image
• video

This is a brand new rich result designed for any site where creators (either people or organizations) share first-hand perspectives. It helps Google Search highlight information about the creator, such as their name or social handle, profile photo, follower count, or the popularity of their content.

Google also claim to make use of this markup when disambiguating the creator, and in features such as Perspectives and Discussions and Forums.

This is a brand new rich result designed for any forum-style site where people collectively share first-hand perspectives.

When forum sites add this markup, Google Search can better identify online discussions across the web and make use of this markup in features such as Perspectives and Discussions and Forums.

This is a brand new rich result for websites that offer online or offline educational courses. Only educational content that fits the following definition of a course is eligible for the Course info rich result: a series or unit of curriculum that contains lectures, lessons, or modules in a particular subject or topic.

You can help people find your course content by telling Google about your course using course info structured data. When you provide more detailed information about a course, such as reviewer ratings, pricing, and course details, Google can better understand your course and present a rich experience to people with the course info rich result.

Google updated their documentation on the dateModified and datePublished properties, to clarify that they recommend providing timezone information - otherwise they will default to the timezone used by Googlebot.

A collection of small fixes based on publisher feedback:

• Added agentInteractionStatistic to provide a way of counting interactions where the item of interest is in an "agent" rather than "object" role on the relevant Action.
• Provided a clearer way to indicate non-Comment items that Comments are attached to, by documenting the use of parentItem on CreativeWork in general. Also made it more explicit that this is especially applicable to those creative works beneath Comment in the type hiearchy which are mentioned in the definition, i.e. Question and Answer.
• Added Comment to the domain of sharedContent to better support link shares on replies/comments even though a lot of sites now support this.
• Expanded range of uploadDate to include DateTime, correcting a longstanding bug.
• Improved error reporting in case the parsing of JSON-LD examples fails.
• Improvements to unit-testing code.
• Fixed all RDF comments that did not finish with a punctuation. Plus improved reporting of these.

This is a brand new rich result for car dealership websites to make their sale vehicle inventory eligible for display on various Google surfaces, including Google Search and dealerships' Business Profiles. People can then search, filter, and easily learn more about vehicles for sale such as availability, pricing, and key information about the vehicles for sale, potentially directing customers to your business.

The Vehicle listing rich result is currently only available in English in the US and US territories. The feature is available on both mobile and desktop.

In an extension to ongoing changes in order to 'simplify' the search results, Google have now removed the How-To rich result for users on mobile devices (it will still be shown for desktop users). Note that with mobile indexing, Google indexes the mobile version of a website as the basis for indexing: to have How-To rich results shown on desktop, the mobile version of your website must include the appropriate markup.

Google announced they are reducing the visibility of FAQ rich results - now, rich results will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown regularly.

Versions 16-22 released in comparatively quick succession, with a range of smaller fixes and updates, including:

• Removed unnecessary reference to geo prefix in Json-ld context file.
• Added example for Drug type.
• Added tripOrigin.
• Added PoliticalParty as type of Organization.
• Fixed a typo in maximumVirtualAttendeeCapacity ("physical" instead of "virtual").
• Added DefinedTerm as an expected value for measurementTechnique and measurementMethod.
• Added an explicit subtype of MediaObject for text: TextObject, and made it a possible expected value for description.
• Noted that thumbnail is potentially applicable to any CreativeWork.
• Removed "courseLength" and added courseSchedule to properly reflect consensus of the public discussion. Added observationPeriod to accompany the recent additions around Observation.
• Amended additionalType to anticipate textual values.
• Consistent formatting of ISSN text in examples.
• Reword definition of timeRequired to be less specific to learning resources.
• Added Microdata example for BlogPosting.
• Added an example of ESIP Science-On-Schema markup to Dataset and ResearchProject.
• Added PerformanceRole example actor property.
• Corrected priceCurrency examples in Offer examples.
• Added bed and occupancy to Accomodation and added a subtype of LodgingBusiness called VacationRental.
• Improvements to Course, introducing properties courseLength, totalHistoricalEnrollment, financialAidEligible, and syllabusSections, alongside side a supporting type, Syllabus.
• The titleEIDR property is now also expected on TVSeason and TVSeries, reflecting industry practice.
• Updated the earlier draft of a vocabulary for statistical observations. The StatisticalPopulation construct is no longer central. Introduced a new StatisticalVariable type, an abstraction for properties that can be measured in a particular place and time. These need not be statistical.