Rich Snippet
A rich snippet is a search result that shows more than a title, a URL and a description: a star rating, a price, opening hours, a question with its answer, or a breadcrumb trail. Google now calls these rich results. The extra detail is read from structured data on the page, and the markup makes a page eligible for it without guaranteeing it.
Where the extra detail comes from
Google reads structured data written into the page as JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa, and when every required property for a feature is present the page becomes eligible for that feature. Eligible is the operative word. Google’s structured data documentation says markup might encourage richer results and stops short of promising them; the page still has to be indexed, and what is shown is decided per query. The search gallery lists the features open to a business: local business details, organization identity, review snippets and breadcrumbs, each with its own required fields.
The same markup in an AI answer
On a results page the markup decorates one listing. In a generated answer there is no listing to decorate; the assistant reads the same markup as a statement of what the business is, where it is and how it is rated, and uses it to decide whether the business can be identified at all. This site’s own audit of 9,483 small-business sites found that only 17.8% carried no schema.org markup, yet most of what the rest carried described the website (WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList) rather than the business, and 8.9% carried rating schema. The breakdown is in what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler. A page can qualify for a rich snippet and still tell an assistant nothing about who is behind it.
A common question
Is a rich snippet the same as a featured snippet?
No. A rich snippet is your own result with extra detail drawn from your markup, shown in its ranked position. A featured snippet is a passage the engine lifts from a page and places above the results as the answer; it needs no markup, and the page owner does not choose it.
Related terms
Sources
Eligibility and formats: Google’s introduction to structured data and its structured data gallery. The 9,483-site figures are this site’s own, computed from its audit records; sample drawn per metro and trade, percentages describe the sample.