The properties Google requires, and what they rest on

What each live feature requires

July 2026 · six ranges, no exact numbersGoogle and the Schema.org community, Schema.org usage statistics dataset. Websites in Google's index.

Across the 30 features, I counted 170 required properties, one row for every feature that asks for a specific one. 169 of them carry a usage figure; the other, xPath on speakable, is not a Schema.org property, so it has no band to sit in and is not counted either way. 168 of the 169 measured properties already sit above Google's smallest band, and that is the real finding here, not a footnote to it. Google will not show a rich result at all if a required property is missing, so a required property has to already be something the web has broadly adopted. Otherwise the feature barely works for anyone who follows the documentation exactly as written. Book breaks that pattern. It requires lender for the library-borrowing action Google documents, and lender sits in Google's smallest band, on fewer than a thousand websites. Build a Book rich result exactly as Google documents it, and you are implementing a property with almost nobody else's markup to check yours against.

That does not mean Book itself is a rare or unusual rich result, or that Google is asking for something impossible to build. It means one property, on one feature, has almost no other implementation to learn from, while every other required property across the 30 features does.

Two live features, Article and Organization, ask for nothing that counts as required. Everything Google lists for either of them is a recommendation, which is why they sit outside the 30.

Required properties Schema.org has not settled

6 of the 30 features rest on at least one required property Schema.org has not folded into a numbered release yet. That is a different question from how much the web uses a property. applicableCountry and returnPolicyCategory already sit on 100,000 to a million websites, heavy adoption by any measure, and Schema.org still lists both as pending.

Schema.org describes its own pending section as "a staging area for work-in-progress terms which have yet to be accepted into the core vocabulary". It warns that "pending terms are subject to change and should be used with caution", and cautions that a pending term "may lack consensus and that terminology and definitions could still change significantly after community and steering group review". You can read the whole description at Schema.org's own documentation for the pending section.

Return policy carries 4 of the 10 pending required properties on this page, applicableCountry, returnPolicyCategory, merchantReturnLink, returnPolicySeasonalOverride, more than any other feature. If you already implement returns markup, you already rely on wording Schema.org itself says could still change. That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to expect you might revisit it.

How much of the vocabulary a rich result ever names

Schema.org publishes 1,529 properties, and I checked how many are named by any documented rich result, required or recommended, across every live and retired feature I hold. 262 are. No documented rich result names the rest, which is 82.86% of everything Schema.org publishes. If you want the exact count instead of the share, subtract 262 from 1,529.

That gap is not a defect in either list. Google documents rich results for a curated set of specific page types, recipes, jobs, events and the rest, and most of what Schema.org describes was never built around one of those. A property with no documented rich result is a property Google has not built a feature around, not a property that is somehow wrong to use.

If a type you are marking up has no live feature anywhere on this site's other reports, that is the expected shape of the data, not a sign you are wasting effort. A rich result is one specific reward among several reasons to publish structured data, and search engines can still read a property that carries no rich result at all.

Known limits of this data

• Google's required-property tables list one thing that is not a Schema.org property at all, xPath on the speakable feature. I keep it in the required-property table because Google asks for it, and it carries no usage figure, because there is nothing in Schema.org for it to have one against. It is not counted in any of the band figures on this page.
• 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.