E-commerce and payments
What is Rich results?
Rich results are enhanced search listings — star ratings, prices, images, breadcrumbs — generated from structured data on the page. Correct markup makes a page eligible; whether the enhancement actually appears is at the search engine’s discretion and is never guaranteed by any amount of markup.
Also called: rich snippets · SERP features
Which ones still exist
| Type | Status |
|---|---|
| Product with price and availability | Active and valuable for retail |
| Breadcrumbs | Active, and cheap to implement |
| Review stars | Active for eligible types, and heavily policed |
| FAQ | Restricted to authoritative government and health sites since 2023 |
| HowTo | Retired from desktop and mobile results |
| Sitelinks searchbox | Retired |
Why still ship the retired ones
FAQ markup earns no rich result for an ordinary business, and it remains the cleanest machine-readable format for AI answer engines to extract question and answer pairs from. Ship it for that reason, and expect nothing visual from Google.
Testing
Use the Rich Results Test for eligibility and the Schema Markup Validator for correctness. Passing one says nothing about the other, and most people only ever run the first.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Schema markup that does something, and the kind that risks a penalty covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.