Recommended is the new required — and your snippets prove it

Recommended is the new required — and your snippets prove it

A pattern from the audits this week: markup that clears Google's required properties but skips the recommended ones, then loses the rich result to a competitor who filled them in. Required gets you eligible; recommended gets you chosen. For Product that means brand, review, aggregateRating, and availability — technically optional, practically decisive.

What it means for you: don't stop at green in the validator. The Rich Results Test flags recommended-property warnings in a separate, easy-to-ignore section. Those warnings are your competitive gap.

Watch this: Merchant listing experiences increasingly gate enhanced features (shipping, returns) behind recommended fields — half-filled markup gets a plain snippet while the complete one gets the full card.