Structured Data - Change History & Alerts

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.

Google updated their documentation to include some examples of how to handle derivatives, integrals, and limits in the potentialAction.mathExpression-input field in the MathSolver documentation.

Google updated the list of countries where the Event search experience is available to only include those where users can see that experience. The previous list also included regions where users could see events in Knowledge Panels.

Google updated their documentation for the Video search feature, changing the description property from required to only recommended (though it's still strongly recommended to help Google better understand the content of your video).

As a result, the missing description issue will no longer appear as a critical issue in Google Search Console, and you may see an increase in the number of valid Video structured data items in the Video enhancement report.

Google updated the Product search feature documentation to detail the properties you can add to make your merchant listing eligible to show return policy information, including return fees and the window of time to return a product.

Google updated their Learning Video search feature documentation, adding a clarification for the required property educationalAlignment.

Now there is a new statement about including multiple values:

"While you may provide multiple educationalAlignment values, it is not guaranteed that all of these values will be used for Learning Video features. If multiple values are provided, and the feature can only use one educationalAlignment value, the feature uses the first value that you provide."

The job search experience is available on Google across different regions of the world. They removed support for South Korea from the region availability - read this article for an explanation why.

Google updated the documentation regarding the recommended property of text ("the text of the question that's being solved in the video"), which previously contained a red box stating 'The text property is required if the learningResourceType property is set to Problem walkthrough.' This has now been removed, so text falls back to just being a recommended property for all types of learning video.

Key moments is an enhancement feature for Video rich results, which allows users to navigate video segments like chapters in a book. If your video is hosted on your web page, you can enable key moments by using SeekToAction structured data. Google updated the documentation to clarify the languages this is supported for: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Turkish, Korean, Dutch, and Russian.