The recovery checklist after the HowTo rich result shutdown

The recovery checklist after the HowTo rich result shutdown

Google fully retired HowTo rich results, so any remaining HowTo markup is now dead weight that can confuse parsers. As of this week, the cleanup most teams skip is the part that matters. Work through it:

— Find every URL still emitting HowTo via a site-wide Rich Results Test sweep or a crawl
— Delete the HowTo JSON-LD entirely — there's no replacement rich result to migrate to
— Preserve the visible step content; only the markup is obsolete, not the page
— Where steps are genuinely a process, leave them as clean semantic HTML (<ol> + headings)
— Confirm the enhancement report stops showing HowTo entirely

What it means for you: orphaned deprecated types add parse noise that AI crawlers must wade through to find what still counts. Watch this — keep your remaining markup lean; every dead type is friction between your content and a citation.