Two Google tools disagreed, and one was right

Two Google tools disagreed, and one was right

A fintech blog couldn't get FAQ rich results to show. The Rich Results Test was green. Live: nothing. -0% movement for a month on a page that should've owned the snippet.

The two tools became the case. Rich Results Test fetches with its own renderer and a generous timeout. URL Inspection's 'live test' shows what Google's indexing pipeline actually rendered. Run both: Rich Results saw the FAQ schema; URL Inspection's rendered HTML did not.

Turns out their schema was injected by a JS widget that fired on a scroll-triggered hydration callback. The Rich Results Test scrolled; the indexing renderer doesn't simulate user scroll. So the JSON-LD never entered the DOM Google indexed.

The fix: move the FAQ JSON-LD into the server response, not a client callback.

Rich snippets appeared in 11 days. The page went from position 6 to a featured FAQ block, +31% clicks in five weeks. Lesson: when two Google tools disagree, believe URL Inspection's rendered HTML — it's the one that ships.