The robots.txt rule quietly killing your rich results

The robots.txt rule quietly killing your rich results

Sneaky failure mode: rich results that need an image (Recipe, Product, Article carousels) silently fail when the image URL referenced in your JSON-LD is blocked in robots.txt.

The disconnect sources miss: your markup validates fine — the image property is syntactically perfect — but Google can't fetch the asset, so the rich result that depends on it never appears. CDNs and image subdomains accidentally disallowed are the usual culprits, and nothing in the Rich Results Test screams about it.

What it means for you — confirm every image URL in your structured data is actually crawlable; spot-check the CDN host's robots.txt, not just your main domain's. Watch this: image-dependent rich results are growing, so this blind spot gets costlier.