Why isn't my recipe structured data showing up in Google search results?

While Recipe Kit optimizes your recipe and inserts all of Google's rich structured data into the webpage, sometimes Google still doesn't display your recipe with rich data in search results.

This is a common question, broadly speaking though, the first step is to ensure that your recipe has gone through the Google rich result testing tool here before moving forward. If your recipe or page is showing any errors, Google will not show the page in search results.

After you confirm the recipe data is valid and Google isn't complaining about anything, we can move forward with some other answers / solutions.

The decision is entirely up to Google.

Recipe Kit provides Google with all of the recipe data that you insert into the app. This is where our job ends. The rest is in Google's hands to determine whether they want to show your recipe with structured data or not.

Typically, it will take a few weeks for a new blog post to show up in Google search results, and potentially even longer for the rich recipe data to display. This depends on Google's opinion of your website (your "site authority") among other things.

Once the page is indexed (aka, once Google knows about the page) the ball is in their court, and they can choose to show your page or not.

Unfortunately, Google is a black box at this stage. If they decide not to show your page (or structured recipe data), there is very little information they give us to determine the WHY. In some cases, this is simply because Google decided your recipe was not worth showing. We don't know why or how they decide this, but this is part of Google's search engine strategy.

What next?

While we don't have a ton of options moving forward here, the best strategy is to...

1. Sign up for Google Search Console Tools: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

Google's Search Console allows you to see a dashboard of all of your websites currently indexed pages, and will let you know if there are any specific issues with individual pages.

2. Keep an eye on your recipe pages, and fix any warnings / errors when possible

Google will show you warnings or errors for your recipe pages. Warnings, in general, are nothing to worry about. Google will show you a warning if you are missing a recipe video, for example, but they don't dock you any points if you don't have a video.

Errors, on the other hand, are REQUIRED fixes. If your recipe is missing an image, Google will simply not display the recipe with any rich data. Likewise, if your recipe is missing ingredients, directions, or a title, an error will occur.

Once the above steps are complete, you have done all you can do... unfortunately. Google is very difficult to communicate with, and beyond ensuring recipe data is properly inserted and no errors are occurring, your recipe results are completely up to Google's magic algorithm to decide what shows and what doesn't show.