Mark Up Your Content Items

When you use structured data to mark up content, you help Google better understand its context for display in Search, and you achieve better distribution of your content to users from Search. You do this by marking up content properties and enabling actions where relevant. This makes it eligible for inclusion in rich results. For more information about rich results, see About Search Features. For some content types, it allows users to engage directly with your content right from Search.

This markup is also the first step to making some content eligible for lists and host-specific list previews. See Mark Up Your Lists for more details.

Qualifying content types

A variety of content types qualify to appear in rich results. CreativeWork is a schema.org type definition that applies to qualifying content produced for reading, viewing, listening or other consumption, such as news articles, recipes, and videos. Other content types, such as products and local business listings, belong to the commerce category, which is a custom category we use to describe schema.org types generally intended for retail purposes.

The table below lists the supported features for each content type.

Content Type	Available Features	Notes
Article	Top stories carousel Rich results	The Top stories carousel requires that your content be published in AMP. For more information, see AMP with structured data.
Local Business	Local business listing
Local Business	Place actions	Requires explicit opt-in. Express interest.
Recipe	Rich results Host-specific lists
Critic review	Critic review cards
Video	Rich results

This remainder of this document describes ways to implement markup to enable features for these types. For the actual markup specification, see the Creative Works (starting with Article) and Commerce section (starting with Local Business) in the reference for each type.

Mark up your content properties

Identify the data type from the table above that represents your content, and navigate to the markup reference for that type to find the required and recommended properties for that type.
You can add markup for multiple content types into a single HTML or AMP HTML content page. For example, your news article might also contain a video, so you could add markup for both types to make your content page eligible for both the top stories carousel or rich results for video. For more information, see About AMP on Google Search.

Create a block of markup containing, at minimum, the required structured data properties for the visual presentation you want to enable in Search.

We recommend you also mark up all available properties for the best enhanced presentation of your content in Search. The data-type reference contains many examples of markup you can customize.

Example Recipe Markup

Insert this markup into each content page you wish to make eligible for a feature.
If a feature requires AMP HTML, this means that the markup must be placed into the content page.
Test your markup using the Structured Data Testing Tool.
This helps you verify that your markup is valid for the features you wish to enable for your content.

Provide actions

When users search Google for a movie or TV show, they might be interested in actually taking action on that content—for example, watching the movie clip on their mobile device, or booking a reservation at your restaurant. If your site or app can handle such actions, then structured data markup can tell Google which actions you handle and for what items. Google can then send such users along to your site or app.

How does it work?

Structured data markup for content that enables actions consists of two broad categories of markup:

Content markup—describes the content itself, starting with high-level properties and then properties for the sub-type. For example, all TV & Movies content uses common properties such as name, URL, and startDate. Beyond that, other properties provide further refinements, such as whether the TV content is part of an episode, a series, or a season.
Action markup—defines action properties, starting with required action properties for most content, such as the type of action the content supports, like a WatchAction or an OrderAction. Other required action properties include elements from the target container, like the platform on which the link to the content will function, such as an Android or iOS app. From there, you can provide further action refinements, such as availability conditions for when the action will work.

The data type reference for each eligible type lists the properties for these categories of content and their actions.

Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results even if structured data is marked up and can be extracted successfully according to the testing tool. Here are some reasons why:

The structured data is not representative of the main content of the page or potentially misleading.
The structured data is incorrect in a way that the testing tool was not able to catch.
The marked-up content is hidden from the user.

Create action markup

The best way to create action markup is to design a specification for your content, and create a markup template or framework from that specification. Then, for each instance of that content, supply values to your template and insert the resulting markup into the HTML page. For example, you’d embed markup in your landing page for an available movie, such as http://www.example.com/movies/forrest_gump. The following steps show a basic process you can follow for designing and implementing action markup.

Determine the relevant content properties for your content.
First, start with your basic data type, such as TV & Movies, or Local Business. Then, determine further refinements for your offering, such as whether you are making TV content available only per episode, or whether you are offering a subscription to a season. Assemble the relevant properties for your spec.
Determine the markup for the action itself.
All action types have required properties, so you’ll want to define those. You can find the list of required actions in the table for each action (such as WatchActions). In addition to required action properties, you might also supply sub-category properties, like ReserveAction or OrderAction properties for businesses.
Specify the target correctly.
A target is a child of potentialAction that specifies all the elements and values necessary to support the connection between the user’s intent and your content’s response. When supplying the link to the content via the urlTemplate, use a fully-qualified URL to a specific piece of content on a website or an Android or iOS native app. You should also explicitly specify the platforms that support each URL using the potentialAction.target.actionPlatform property. For details on supplying links to your app content and providing URL associations between your app and your site, see the Firebase documentation on App Indexing.
Design a template.
Use any of the examples available from the reference documentation for your content type. These examples load directly into the structured data testing tool for easy modification and verification.
Insert the markup into your page.
Once you add structured data to your site's content, Google will discover it the next time we reprocess your site (it may take some time for rich results (previously known as rich snippets) to appear in search results, if we do choose to display rich results for your site).
Test your markup using the Structured Data Test Tool.
Do this during development by pasting the markup itself into the tool. After you publish your page, you can supply the URL to your page to verify your markup a second time.