What are rich results (rich snippets)?

What a lot of people still call rich snippets, Google calls rich results: the result that shows up with something more than the link and two lines of text. In a product search it is the line with the price, "In stock" and some stars with the number of reviews. It is not an ad: it is your organic result, presented with more data. It matters to you because it is the part of your product page's structured data that the shopper sees before entering the store, and because it is very easy to confuse your page being able to have them with its actually having them.

How it works

Google uses structured data to understand the content of a page and to show it with a richer appearance in results, which is what it calls a rich result.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Structured data markup that Google Search supports} Each type has its own requirements: which Schema.org type gets marked up and which properties are required. Its gallery lists the ones Search supports today, including article, breadcrumb, event, recipe, video, organization, review snippet and product.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Structured data markup that Google Search supports}

The path has three steps, and only the first depends on you:

1. You mark up the page with structured data, written in JSON-LD, microdata or RDFa. Google supports all three and recommends JSON-LD.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search}
2. The page becomes eligible if the markup includes all the required properties for the result type and meets Google's quality guidelines.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. General structured data guidelines}
3. Google decides whether to show it, search by search. It doesn't guarantee that your structured data will appear in results even when the page is marked up correctly, and it adapts what it shows to each person's search history, location or device type.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. General structured data guidelines}

For a store, the ones that count are the product ones. With product structured data, Google can show the price, availability, ratings and shipping details right in the results, in Search, Google Images and Lens.⁠^{[4]Google Search Central. Introduction to Product structured data} There are two variants. Product snippets are for pages where you can't buy, such as an editorial review; merchant listings are for pages where the customer buys, and they allow more detail, such as sizes, shipping or returns.⁠^{[4]Google Search Central. Introduction to Product structured data} Google adds that providing the data on the page and also a feed in Google Merchant Center maximizes your chances of appearing.⁠^{[4]Google Search Central. Introduction to Product structured data}

The list isn't fixed. Google stopped showing the FAQ rich result in Search, the one generated with FAQPage, as of May 7, 2026, and on June 15 it withdrew its documentation.⁠^{[5]Google Search Central. Latest documentation updates} Markup can be left without the result that justified adding it, which is why it pays to check once in a while which types Google still supports instead of taking it for granted.

To see what Google sees on your site, Search Console has rich result status reports: they count how many valid and invalid items it has found on the site. A valid item is one with no critical issues that can appear as a rich result; an invalid one has at least one critical issue that prevents it. The product ones are in the Shopping section, one for product snippets and another for merchant listings, and they show a sample of the items detected, not the full list.⁠^{[6]Search Console Help. Rich result status reports}

In a store

What Google can add to a product page's result and where each piece of data comes from. Fictional example: the store, the shirt, the price and the reviews are made up to show the mechanism.

Everything hangs off the page's Product node, and each row is a condition, not a promise. When the Rich Results Test passes the markup as valid, it means the page is eligible; the tool itself warns that Google doesn't guarantee the page will appear as the tool shows it, or that any of the views it displays will be applied.⁠^{[7]Search Console Help. Rich Results Test} And the stars row has one more condition: the reviews have to be visible on the page, because Google asks you not to mark up content the page's reader can't see.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. General structured data guidelines}

The practical consequence is that there are two different questions, with two different tests. "Is my page eligible?" is answered with Google's tool and the Search Console reports. "Does my page show up with price and stars?" is answered only by searching, with a date, and knowing that what you see needn't be what someone else sees in another place or on another device.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. General structured data guidelines}

How to check it

1. Run a product page's URL through the Rich Results Test. It tells you which rich results it detects, whether the markup is valid, has warnings or is invalid, and by default it tests the page as a mobile device would see it.⁠^{[7]Search Console Help. Rich Results Test}
2. Open the Search Console product reports, in the Shopping section, and see how many valid and invalid items the site has and which critical issue keeps recurring.⁠^{[6]Search Console Help. Rich result status reports}
3. Search for your own product page on Google with the query a customer would use and note what you see and when. A search is a sample, not a position: Google adapts the result to each person.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. General structured data guidelines}
4. Compare each piece of data that appears (price, availability, stars) with what the page shows that day. If they don't match, the problem is in the markup, not in Google.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. General structured data guidelines}

Related concept: structured data

Structured data is what you write on the page; the rich result is what Google decides to show with it. The first depends on you and the second doesn't.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. General structured data guidelines} That is why a report that says "we have rich snippets" because the tool comes back green is mixing up the two. And outside classic results the relationship is looser still: for its generative AI features, Google says structured data isn't a requirement and there is no special markup, yet it still advises continuing to use it because it helps you qualify for rich results.⁠^{[9]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}

To keep going, the structured data reading path puts the other terms in order, and the comparison of validating markup versus verifying publication separates what a validator says from what is really on the page.