Why rich snippets stop showing

01Is valid markup the same as an eligible page?

Rich snippets not showing after you added valid markup? The first thing to accept is that a clean test is not a promise. A rich snippet is an enhanced search result, such as review stars, a price or a recipe image, that Google can build from structured data. Google's general structured data guidelines put it plainly:

The same page lists the reasons Google may still show a plain result: the algorithm decided a text result serves the searcher better, the markup does not represent the main content, it is wrong in a way the Rich Results Test cannot catch, it describes content hidden from users, or the page breaks a guideline. Treat a passing test as the floor. Our guide to testing structured data explains what each tool can and cannot see.

02Which policy and type limits apply?

Some types no longer earn a rich result for most sites. In August 2023 Google said FAQ rich results would be shown only for well-known, authoritative government and health websites, and in September 2023 it stopped showing How-to results altogether, according to the Search Central announcement on HowTo and FAQ changes. If your missing snippet is an FAQ accordion on a blog post, nothing is broken, and Google says there is no need to remove the markup.

Review stars have their own list. Since a September 2019 change described in Google's post on making review rich results more helpful, review rich results show only for a fixed set of schema types and their subtypes, including Product, Recipe, Book, Course, Event, LocalBusiness, Organization and SoftwareApplication. A review attached to a plain Article or WebPage can be valid schema.org and still earn nothing.

Required properties are the other hard limit. The general guidelines state that items missing required properties are not eligible for rich results, and the Search Console report for the type lists them as invalid. These are the easy cases, because the tools flag them.

03What counts as a self-serving review?

A self-serving review is a review of a business or organization that the business itself controls and publishes on its own site. The 2019 review rich results update stopped showing stars in that case for LocalBusiness and Organization types and their subtypes, whether the markup is written by hand or arrives through an embedded third-party widget.

This explains many WordPress sites that lost stars on a home page or services page. The review plugin still prints valid markup and the test still passes, but the entity being reviewed is the site owner. Reviews of products you sell are a different case: Product is on the eligible list, though the reviews must still be genuine.

Google's review snippet guidelines add the content rules: reviews must be readily available to users on the page, ratings for local businesses must be sourced directly from users, reviews must not be aggregated from other websites, and fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews are not allowed. The guide to review schema and review snippets covers the properties in detail.

04Can site quality stop rich results?

Yes, though Google frames it as guidelines rather than a score. The general guidelines say that violating a quality guideline can prevent syntactically correct structured data from being displayed as a rich result, and that these guidelines are not easily testable with an automated tool. Marking up irrelevant or misleading content, content readers cannot see, or reviews no real customer wrote all fall into this group.

The same guidelines ask for up-to-date information and say Google will not show a rich result for time-sensitive content that is no longer relevant. A WordPress site that keeps expired event or offer posts live, with their markup intact, has a quiet cause of missing results.

There is no switch to flip here. Fix the content first: make the visible page match the markup, remove reviews you cannot stand behind, and keep markup on the page it describes. Then give Google time to recrawl.

05How long do rich results take to return after a fix?

Longer than most people expect. Google's review snippet documentation says to allow time for re-crawling and re-indexing, noting that it may take several days after publishing a page for Google to find and crawl it. A page blocked by robots.txt or carrying noindex cannot show a rich result at all, because the general guidelines require structured data pages to stay accessible to Googlebot.

On WordPress, check two things that quietly block crawling: the Search engine visibility setting under Settings, Reading, left on after a staging copy went live, and any caching or security layer that can serve a different page to bots than to visitors.

06What does a structured data manual action do?

A manual action is a penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google after a guideline violation. For structured data the effect is narrow, as the general guidelines explain:

Check the Manual Actions report in Search Console. If there is a structured data action, fix every affected template rather than only the example URLs, then request reconsideration. Without a manual action, the cause is one of the others in this guide.

07Rich snippets not showing: the nine-cause checklist

Work down the table in order. The first two are technical and show up in tools; the rest are policy, judgement or time, and no validator will flag them reliably. If several WordPress plugins print markup, also run the audit of your WordPress schema plugin so you fix the block Google actually reads rather than a duplicate. Keep a dated note of each change; if the stars return after a recrawl, you will know which fix mattered.

If you are weighing whether the effort is worth it, the handbook home takes on the question does structured data still matter? for search and AI answers, and the other how-tos are collected in the WordPress guides.