Rich result reports in Search Console

This guide is built from Search Console Help: Rich result report overview, Fix structured data issues, Debug missing structured data, Unparsable structured data report, Rich result error messages and Rich Results Test, plus Google Search Central's structured data guidelines and introduction to structured data. Which markup to add is covered in our structured data guide; how to inspect a single page is covered in our URL Inspection guide. This page is about the site-wide reports.

Where the reports are

Open Search Console and look under Enhancements in the left menu. Product snippets and merchant listings sit under Shopping instead. There is one report for each rich result type Google found on the property, and Google says a report appears only if it "finds valid markup in your property" and "the markup is a supported rich result type."

Google lists reports for Breadcrumbs, Datasets, Discussion forum, Education Q&As, Events, Hotels, Image metadata, Job postings, Math solvers, Merchant listings, Practice problems, Product snippets, Profile pages, Q&As, Recipes, Review snippets, Subscribed content, Vacation rentals and Videos. The Rich Results Test checks more types than that, such as Article, Local business and Organization, so valid markup of those types won't get a report of its own. Shops also get the Shopping reports, which our product structured data guide explains.

Valid and invalid items

Each report opens on a landing page with a chart of valid and invalid items over time, two issue tables and a link to the valid items. Google's definitions:

• Valid item. "An item that doesn't have any critical issues and can appear on Google as a rich result."
• Invalid item. An item with "at least one critical issue preventing it from appearing as a rich result."

Three things trip people up when reading the numbers:

• The counts are items, not pages. A page with two marked-up items counts as two.
• The report is a sample. Google says the reports "aren't a comprehensive list of all detected items" and show a sample to help you judge the quality of your markup. The valid plus invalid total can be lower than the number of items Google knows about.
• Issue totals can be higher than item totals. One item can have several critical and non-critical issues, so it shows up in several issue rows but only once in the invalid count.

Some reports also have an impressions overlay, which shows rich result impressions over time. That is the place to see whether a markup change affected how often the rich result appeared.

Critical and non-critical issues

The two tables on the landing page split the issues by severity:

Table	What Google says it shows	Effect on the item
Why items are invalid	Critical issues. "These issues prevent your structured data from being used by Google."	Invalid: not eligible for the rich result.
Improve item appearance	Non-critical issues affecting your structured data.	Still valid and can appear as a rich result.

Fix the critical issues first. Click an issue row to open its details page, which shows the issue description and a documentation link, the validation state, the First detected date, and up to 1,000 example rows with their last crawl date. Each example has an inspect button that runs URL Inspection on that page.

Google's error messages page lists the common ones. Some that show up on business sites:

• Missing field "property name". A required property is absent. Google notes this "can also occur if the name is an empty string".
• Datetime property is missing a timezone and Date/time not in ISO 8601 format. Add a timezone, and give dates and times in ISO 8601.
• Invalid object type for field and Invalid value type for field. The property holds the wrong kind of value, such as a text string where Google expects an object.
• Rating is missing required best and/or worst values. Needed when the rating falls outside the default 1 to 5 scale.
• Item does not support review. Google supports reviews only of certain types of things.
• Data-vocabulary.org schema deprecated. Markup in the old data-vocabulary.org vocabulary. Google says to update to schema.org.

The full fix for each issue lives in the documentation for that rich result type; our guides to breadcrumb markup, Organization markup and LocalBusiness markup cover three common types.

The Unparsable structured data report

When a syntax error is serious enough that Google can't even tell what type the markup was meant to be, the item goes into the Unparsable structured data report instead. It only appears if Google found unparsable markup on your site, and "all items in this report are critical structured data errors; there are no warnings or valid items." The errors are JSON-level: Invalid JSON document, missing commas, colons or braces, bad escape sequences in strings, duplicate unique properties.

Google notes that "the most common cause of a single error affecting multiple pages is an underlying template error." It suggests pasting the code into the Rich Results Test and, if the error is hard to find, starting from an empty object and adding the code back piece by piece. Expect new issues after the fix: Google says fixing a parsing error "might trigger additional warnings or errors that were hidden because the item could not be parsed at all."

Fixing an issue and Validate fix

Search Console has no "fix" button, because "the structured data resides on your website, not Google's servers." Google's steps:

1. Open the report, click an issue in the Why items are invalid table and look at the affected pages. Fix one issue across all its URLs before moving on. If the cause is a template, fixing the template fixes every page that uses it.
2. Deploy the fix and make sure the pages can be crawled, not blocked by robots.txt or noindex. Check a few pages with Test live URL in URL Inspection.
3. Click Validate fix on the issue details page. Google checks a sample of pages first; if the error is still there, validation stops. Otherwise it queues the affected URLs for recrawling.

Google says "validation can take two weeks or more, depending on crawl frequency." The issue details page shows the state as it goes:

State	What it means
Not started	No validation has been tried.
Started	Validation is in progress.
Looking good	The instances checked so far are passing.
Passed	All known instances are resolved.
Failed	Issues remain on some URLs. Fix them and restart.
N/A	The issue was fixed without a validation attempt.

If validation fails, wait for the current cycle to finish before starting again. You don't strictly need to validate: Google may pick up fixes during its normal crawl. Validating gets the pages recrawled sooner, gives you email updates and a log for each URL. An issue stays open until 90 days pass with no new instances; one that comes back after that counts as a new issue.

Missing items and sudden drops

Google's debugging page gives these reasons for markup that never shows up in a report:

• The report only shows a sample of your pages.
• The markup can't be parsed, so it sits in the Unparsable report.
• The pages aren't indexed. "Only indexed pages appear in Search Console reports."
• Google hasn't recrawled the pages since the markup went live.
• A login, robots.txt rule or noindex keeps Google out.

A drop in valid items usually means fewer indexed pages, new critical or parsing errors on pages that used to be valid, or a change in the sample. Google's order of checks: confirm the pages are indexed with URL Inspection (our Page indexing report guide covers the site-wide view), run them through the Rich Results Test, then confirm nothing blocks access. If valid items fall to zero right after a release, look at what changed in the templates. Google's own introduction warns that pages "might break after deployment due to templating or serving issues."

Valid items don't guarantee rich results either. Google says it "does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results, even if your page is marked up correctly." A page can also lose eligibility through a structured data manual action, which Google says doesn't affect ranking in web search.

Rich Results Test or URL Inspection

Both tools check one page, where the reports cover the whole property. Google says you can check compliance with its technical guidelines with either, and both "catch most technical errors." They differ in what they can test:

	Rich Results Test	URL Inspection
What it tests	A public URL or a pasted code snippet	A URL in a property you have access to
Indexed version	No, it fetches the page now	Yes, plus a live test
Draft code before launch	Yes, choose Code and paste it	No
Best for	Building and fixing markup	Confirming what Google has indexed, and requesting a recrawl

A few details from the Rich Results Test help page: it fetches as Google-InspectionTool, so pages behind a login or firewall can't be tested; it uses a smartphone user agent by default; it reads JSON-LD, RDFa and Microdata; and it ignores comments inside JSON-LD, though Google says to remove them before publishing because the JSON-LD standard doesn't support them. If the test can't load some page resources, results can differ between runs.

Our routine after a markup change

This part is our own practice, not Google guidance. On sites we build, we test each page template in the Rich Results Test before release, then run URL Inspection on one live page per template after it ships. A week or two later we open each report under Enhancements and compare the valid item count with what we expected; a fall to zero almost always points to a template. Critical issues get fixed and validated straight away. Non-critical ones we fix when the missing property is something we really have, such as an image or a price, and leave alone when filling it would mean inventing data. For the monthly checks around this, see our Search Console basics guide.

Frequently asked questions

Why is there no rich result report for my site?

A report appears only if Google finds valid markup of a supported rich result type in the property. If the markup has syntax errors, check the Unparsable structured data report; if the pages aren't indexed, their structured data won't show at all.

What is the difference between a critical and a non-critical issue?

A critical issue makes the item invalid, so it can't appear as a rich result; these are listed under Why items are invalid. Non-critical issues are listed under Improve item appearance; the item stays valid and eligible.

How long does Validate fix take?

Google says validation can take two weeks or more, depending on how often it crawls your site. Google checks a sample of pages first and stops if the error is still there.

Why does the report show fewer items than my site has?

The reports show a sample of detected items, not a full list, and only indexed pages appear. Use URL Inspection to check a page that isn't listed.

Does a valid item mean Google will show a rich result?

No. Google says valid markup makes a page eligible but does not guarantee the rich result, even if the Rich Results Test shows no errors.

For more on Search Console, see our guides to the Sitemaps report, Video indexing report and the Performance report. For which schema types are still worth adding, see our FAQ structured data guide and Article markup guide.