<b>Rich results that appeared and disappeared at random</b>

<b>Rich results that appeared and disappeared at random</b>

A recipe publisher's rich results flickered — star ratings and cook times would show in the SERP for a week, vanish for two, return briefly. Roughly 55% of recipes had their enhancements at any given moment, and which 55% kept changing.

The structured data was injected client-side. A JavaScript snippet built the <code>&lt;script type="application/ld+json"&gt;</code> block after fetching nutrition data on hydration. Google can read JS-injected JSON-LD — but only when the second-wave render succeeds and completes before the data fetch times out. On crawls where the nutrition API was slow, the JSON-LD never got injected in the captured DOM. The Rich Results parser saw no structured data and dropped the enhancement until the next lucky render.

The flicker was just the lottery of whether each recrawl caught the data in time.

We moved the JSON-LD into the server response with the data already fetched.

—Recipes with stable rich results: 55% → 98%
—Organic CTR on recipe pages: +23%

Structured data that depends on a flaky fetch is structured data that flickers. Render it on the server, once, with the numbers already in it.