What is a rich result?
A rich result is a listing that is more than a blue link and two lines of text. The recipe card with a photo, a star rating and a cooking time. The product listing showing price and whether it is in stock. The event with its dates. The how-to with its steps. The FAQ that expands beneath the link. Google builds these from structured data, usually schema.org markup written in JSON-LD, that the page's owner has added to describe what the page contains in a form a machine can read.
Rich results is Google's own umbrella term, and it has largely replaced rich snippets, the older name for the same idea. Google maintains a gallery of the types it supports, around thirty at any time, and a Rich Results Test that checks a page's markup against them. Types come and go: the FAQ and how-to rich results were sharply restricted in 2023, which is a reminder that the feature belongs to Google, not to the site.
Why it matters
Why rich results matter
Space and attention. A rich result takes more of the screen than a plain listing, and it shows the searcher useful information before the click: the rating, the price, the date, the answer. Listings that carry those elements are clicked more often than plain ones in the same position, and on mobile, where the first screen holds two or three results, the difference is larger.
They also tell the searcher what kind of page they are about to visit. A product rich result says this is a page where you can buy; a video rich result says there is a film here, and for a brand that is the thing it is proud of, shown on the results page itself.
In practice
How rich results work in practice
- 01
Pick the type that honestly describes the page. A product page gets product markup; an article gets article markup; a page with a film on it gets video markup with a thumbnail, a duration and a description. Then add the structured data, as JSON-LD in the page head, with every required property filled in with values that match what is visible on the page. Most content management systems and SEO plugins generate the common types; the custom ones are written by hand or templated.
- 02
Validate with the Rich Results Test, fix what it flags, and publish. Google decides whether to show the rich result; valid markup makes it eligible, not guaranteed. Afterwards, Search Console's enhancement reports list every page with markup of each type and whether it is valid, and the performance report can be filtered by search appearance to show how often the rich results are shown and clicked.
At RIOT
Rich results at RIOT
Every page in this glossary carries FAQ structured data: the questions at the foot of each entry are marked up as a question-and-answer set, so a search engine can read them as exactly that. Whether Google shows them as a rich result is Google's decision, as it is for everyone, but the page tells the truth about itself in a form the machine can read, and that is the part we control.
Watch out
What people get wrong about rich results
Marking up what is not on the page. Structured data that claims ratings, prices or FAQs the visitor cannot see violates Google's guidelines and can bring a manual action for spammy structured data, which removes rich results across the whole site.
The other mistake is expecting the markup to raise rankings. Structured data makes a listing richer; it does not move the listing up. The page still has to earn its position the usual way, and the rich result is what it wears once it gets there.
