Report
The properties Google recommends and almost nobody uses
You almost certainly implement what Google requires, because it is mandatory and the documentation says so plainly. What Google merely recommends is a different matter, and the gap there is much wider than it looks. Of the 314 recommended properties that appear in Google's own usage file, 109 are used by fewer than 100,000 websites. Below is the whole list, feature by feature, with the page each requirement came from and the date that page last changed.
- Thinly used109
- Of recommended314
- Share34.71%
- Live features33
Where the gap is
July 2026 · six ranges, no exact numbersGoogle and the Schema.org community, Schema.org usage statistics dataset. Websites in Google's index.
Retail is the largest single cluster, though not the majority of the gap. Merchant listing, return policy and shipping policy between them account for 40 thinly used properties between them. The same cluster shows up from the opposite direction in the usage file, where 22 terms Schema.org has not yet ratified are already on 100,000 websites or more, mostly merchant returns and product variants. Read together, those two facts say the same thing. Retail markup is moving faster than either Google's recommendations or Schema.org's own approval process.
| Feature | Thinly used | Recommended | Share | Status | Google page | Page updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Merchant listing | 18 | 44 | 40.91% | Live | merchant-listing | |
| Return policy | 11 | 17 | 64.71% | Live | return-policy | |
| Shipping policy | 11 | 24 | 45.83% | Live | shipping-policy | |
| Dataset | 10 | 19 | 52.63% | Live | dataset | |
| Job posting | 9 | 12 | 75.00% | Live | job-posting | |
| Recipe | 8 | 15 | 53.33% | Live | recipe | |
| Organization | 7 | 28 | 25.00% | Live | organization | |
| Discussion forum | 4 | 12 | 33.33% | Live | discussion-forum | |
| Vacation rental | 4 | 39 | 10.26% | Live | vacation-rental | |
| Video | 4 | 10 | 40.00% | Live | video | |
| Book | 3 | 8 | 37.50% | Live | book | |
| Education Q&A | 3 | 5 | 60.00% | Live | education-qa | |
| Q&A page | 3 | 10 | 30.00% | Live | qapage | |
| Image license metadata | 2 | 5 | 40.00% | Live | image-license-metadata | |
| Local business | 2 | 17 | 11.76% | Live | local-business | |
| Math solvers | 2 | 3 | 66.67% | Live | math-solvers | |
| Product snippet | 2 | 9 | 22.22% | Live | product-snippet | |
| Loyalty program | 2 | 3 | 66.67% | Live | loyalty-program | |
| Factcheck | 1 | 7 | 14.29% | Phasing out | factcheck | |
| Movie | 1 | 4 | 25.00% | Live | movie | |
| Product variants | 1 | 9 | 11.11% | Live | product-variants | |
| Profile page | 1 | 9 | 11.11% | Live | profile-page |
Features Google has retired
Structured data advice ages badly, and a lot of what you will still find online recommends markup for features that no longer exist. FAQ is the one most often got wrong. You will read that it is now restricted to health and government sites. It is not restricted. It is gone, and the markup you add for it does nothing.
| Feature | Removed | Why, in Google's words |
|---|---|---|
| Job training | Documentation removed. Tested with a group of site owners and found not useful for the ecosystem at scale. | |
| How-to | Documentation removed. The rich result is no longer shown in search results, on both desktop and mobile devices. | |
| Home activity | Documentation removed. The feature no longer appears in Google Search results. | |
| Sitelinks search box | Documentation removed and the nositelinkssearchbox rule archived. The feature is no longer available in Google Search results. | |
| Special announcement | Documentation removed. No longer shown in Google Search results. | |
| Course info | Documentation removed. No longer shown in Google Search results. Distinct from the Course carousel feature, which is still live. | |
| Estimated salary | Documentation removed. No longer shown in Google Search results. | |
| Learning video | Documentation removed. No longer shown in Google Search results. | |
| Vehicle listing | Documentation removed. No longer shown in Google Search results. | |
| Practice problems | Documentation removed. Search Console rich result reporting, the Rich Result Test and the Search appearance filters dropped it in January 2026. | |
| FAQ | Documentation removed. Google: "The FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results." Restricted to well-known authoritative government and health websites from 2023-09-14, then withdrawn entirely. |
Known limits of this data
- Google lists enumeration values in the same table column as property names, so a few of the rows below are values rather than properties. EventScheduled on the event page is one. I have not stripped them by hand, and until I do you should read a handful of the entries as approximate.
- Names with a dot in them, such as offers.price and ListItem.position, are Google notation for a property nested inside another type rather than Schema.org terms in their own right. The usage figure against them is for the last part of the name.
How this is measured
Google documents what each rich result needs on its own page and publishes no machine-readable version of any of it, so I read the requirements out of the markup of those pages on 11 August 2026, covering 33 live features. Every requirement below carries the address it came from and that page's own last-updated date. Google rewrites these pages without announcing it, so a requirement quoted without a date is a claim about a target that has already moved.
I then matched those requirements against Google's usage file for July 2026. Google recommends 339 properties across the live features, and 314 of them appear in the usage file, which is what lets me put an adoption figure against each one. 109 of those, 34.71%, are used by fewer than a hundred thousand websites.
One decision shapes this whole report, and you should weigh it before acting on anything here. I counted only what Google recommends, not what it requires, because required fields are adopted far more widely and the systematic gap is not there. That is not universal. A few features do require a property almost nobody uses, and Book is the clearest case, so a required field is worth checking rather than assuming. But what Google merely suggests is where the broad opportunity sits, and it is also where you should be most careful, because a recommended property is a hint about what Google can use rather than a promise of a rich result. The known limits above apply to the table as well.
You can download the same figures as JSON or CSV and check any number on this page against them.
Usage snapshot July 2026. Requirements read 11 August 2026. Built 12 August 2026.
Analysis © Eduard Dziak, licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Please credit eduarddziak.com with a link. Source data: Google and the Schema.org community, Schema.org usage statistics dataset. Rich result requirements: Google Search Central, licensed CC BY 4.0. Term descriptions: Schema.org, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, each term linking to its own page.