Rich Snippets
Achieving Visibility
Google has spent the last few years quietly retiring rich result types it considers overused or abused — most recently pulling FAQ rich results entirely on 7 May 2026, following the earlier removal of HowTo snippets in 2023 and seven further schema types in 2025. If your content strategy still treats FAQ or HowTo markup as a visibility lever, it’s time to redirect that effort. Discover the rich snippets still worth building for.
What’s Gone (Don’t Chase These)
FAQ rich results — retired 7 May 2026. FAQPage schema is still valid and won’t break anything if left in place, but it no longer produces the expandable dropdown in Search. Keep the content, drop the SERP expectation.
HowTo rich results — deprecated on desktop back in 2023, fully gone since. Same principle: keep step-by-step content where it helps the reader, don’t build it for the snippet.
The Bit Most People Are Missing: The AI Citation
Google’s own AI Overviews guidance states there’s no special schema required to be cited — what gets pulled into an AI-generated answer is the clarity of the visible content itself, not the markup wrapped around it. Clean, well-structured, question-led content still performs strongly for AI citation purposes, even without a rich result attached. Build FAQ and HowTo-style content because it’s genuinely useful and answers real questions clearly — not because you’re expecting a SERP dropdown for it.
below are two examples of generative search (citations) for ‘The SEO Colour Wheel’
What do you need to focus on?
So, while traditional SEO still applies, there are now more complex layers that tend to fall into semantic SEO, these will serve you for both AI visibility and also search engine visibility – and ultimately, the aim is to generate traffic that is convertible, matched and can click through from the citation, as opposed to have their query answered without a visit.
- Traditional SEO theory focused on:
- keywords
- relevance
- authority
- crawlability
- information retrieval
- ranking algorithms
- Modern SEO theory increasingly includes:
- entity understanding
- semantic relationships
- structured data
- machine-readable context
- answer extraction
- AI retrieval systems
Rich snippets sit directly in that second group because they are essentially:
“The practical implementation of semantic SEO theory using structured data.”
Active Rich Snippets to increase Organic Search Visibility
The below is a list of some of the rich snippets which are still active and still appear in the search results.
Product / Review / AggregateRating — What it looks like: Star ratings, price, and stock status directly under a listing. How to get it: Structured Product, Offer, and AggregateRating schema matching genuinely visible reviews and pricing on the page.
Article — What it looks like: Enhanced listings with publish date, headline, and sometimes a thumbnail. How to get it: Article or BlogPosting schema with accurate author, headline, and date fields.
BreadcrumbList — What it looks like: A path (e.g. Home > SEO > Rich Snippets) shown instead of the raw URL. How to get it: itemListElement array of at least two ListItem entries, each with position and name — reflecting the user’s typical path, not the raw URL structure.
LocalBusiness — What it looks like: Map pack eligibility, opening hours, and address details in local search. How to get it: LocalBusiness schema matched to your Google Business Profile.
Event — What it looks like: Date, location and ticketing info surfaced directly in the SERP. How to get it: Event schema with accurate startDate, location, and offer details.
VideoObject — What it looks like: Video thumbnails and ‘Key Moments’ jump-to-timestamp markers. How to get it: minimum name, thumbnailUrl, uploadDate. Use interactionStatistic for view counts, not the deprecated interactionCount. Add hasPart with nested Clip objects for Key Moments.
Recipe — What it looks like: Star ratings, cook time, and calorie info in a card format.
JobPosting — What it looks like: Enhanced listings in Google’s Jobs search experience.
SEO Services
The majority of the work in which I have been involved in since 2019 is SEO, this is built on many years in Marketing Management and Agency roles whereby I was strategically managing channel performance, creative and content initiatives. Building SEO funnels, strategically building strong content and serving semantic relationships in machine readable structures is work best completed by an experienced Freelance SEO. This is a good solution for those of you with a requirement to improve website performance and cost-effectively manage the marketing and messaging of your website.
For design, website development and SEO I can provide all of the services you require in the process – trusted wordpress freelancers uk