Event (Event) structured data

The event experience on Google makes it easier for people to discover and attend events
through Google Search results and other Google products, like Google Maps. This feature brings
many benefits:

• More interactive results: Your events can be eligible to be displayed in
  the event experience on Google, featuring your logo, description of the event, and more.
• Increased chances of discovery and conversion: People have a new way to
  interact with your event posting and click through to your site. Learn how
  Eventbrite saw a 100% increase in
  the typical year-over-year growth of traffic from Google Search.

There are three options to make your events eligible to appear on Google:

• If you use a third-party website to post events (for example, you post
  events on ticketing websites or social platforms), check to see if your event publisher is
  already participating in the event search experience on Google. If your event publisher is
  integrated with Google, continue to post your events on the third-party website. You can
  stop reading here.
• If you use a CMS (for example, WordPress) and you don’t have access to your HTML, check
  with your CMS to see if there’s a plugin that can add structured data to your site for you.
  Alternatively, you can use the
  Data Highlighter to tell
  Google about your events without editing the HTML of your site.
• If you’re comfortable editing your HTML, use structured data to directly integrate
  with Google. You’ll need to edit the HTML of the event pages.

How to add structured data

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page
content. If you’re new to structured data, you can learn more about
how structured data works.

Here’s an overview of how to build, test, and release structured data.

1. Add the required properties. Based on the
   format you’re using, learn where to insert structured data on the page.
2. Follow the guidelines.
3. Validate your code using the
   Rich Results Test
   and fix any critical errors. Consider also fixing any non-critical issues that may be flagged
   in the tool, as they can help improve the quality of your structured data (however, this isn’t necessary to be eligible for rich results).
4. Deploy a few pages that include your structured data and use the URL Inspection tool to test how Google sees the page. Be sure that your page is
   accessible to Google and not blocked by a robots.txt file, the noindex tag, or
   login requirements. If the page looks okay, you can
   ask Google to recrawl your URLs.
5. To keep Google informed of future changes, we recommend that you
   submit a sitemap. You can automate this with the
   Search Console Sitemap API.

Examples

Standard event

Here’s an example of standard Event in JSON-LD. A standard event means that the event
is happening at a physical location only and the event is happened as scheduled. You can also
use Microdata or RDFa syntax.

Event with an updated status

There are multiple ways to set the status of an event. Here are some common examples of events that have an updated status. For more information, refer to the eventStatus property.

Region and language availability

We are excited to bring the event search experience on Google to more regions around the world. The experience is available in the following regions and languages.

Guidelines

You must follow these guidelines to be eligible to appear in the event search experience on
Google.

• Technical guidelines
• Content guidelines
• Date and time guidelines
• Search Essentials
• General structured data guidelines

Technical guidelines

• The target page must contain structured data items from event types on schema.org.
• Each event MUST have a unique URL (a leaf page) and markup on that URL.
• The event experience on Google only supports pages that focus on a single
  event. We recommend focusing on adding markup to your event posting pages instead of pages
  that list schedules or multiple events.
• Mark up multi-day events correctly:
  • If your event or ticket info is for an event that runs over several days, specify both
    the start and end dates of the event.
  • If there are several different performances across different days, each with individual tickets,
    add a separate Event element for each performance.

Content guidelines

• Each event must accurately describe the event name, start date, and location.
• Avoid marking non-events as events:
  • Don’t promote non-event products or services such as “Trip package: San Diego/LA, 7
    nights” as events.
  • Don’t add short-term discounts or purchase opportunities, such as: “Concert — buy your
    tickets now,” or “Concert – 50% off until Saturday.”
  • Don’t mark business hours as events, such as: “Adventure park open 8 AM to 5PM.”
  • Don’t mark coupons or vouchers as events, such as: “5% off your first order.”
• Events must be bookable to the general public. Events that require a membership, or invitation
  prior to purchasing the ticket or attending the event are ineligible for the event experience.
• Spectator events where the primary participants and audience are minors and occur on-premise
  of a school aren’t eligible for the event experience. For example, student events occurring
  on school premises.
• Virtual experiences that have no real-world component aren’t supported. Events
  must take place in a physical location.

Date and time guidelines

When implementing the startDate, endDate,
and previousStartDate properties, follow these
date and time guidelines.

How to specify timezones

Specify the timezone by including the UTC or GMT time offset. If the event starts at
7pm on September 5 in New York, the startDate value would be GMT/UTC-5 during
standard time and GMT/UTC-4 during daylight savings time. During standard time, startDate
value would be "2019-09-05T19:00:00-05:00" oder
"2019-09-05T19:00:00-04:00" respectively. If no timezone is provided, Google uses
the timezone of the event’s location as specified in location.

Best practices

• Event takes place over a range of dates: If the event takes place
  over the course of multiple days, indicate both the start and end date. Don’t
  indicate the time if you don’t know the time.

  Recommended

  Recommended

  Not recommended
• Event starts at a specific hour:
  If the event starts at a specific time, such as 5pm locally, use
  2019-07-20T17:00:00. Include the appropriate UTC offset (for example,
  use 2019-07-20T17:00:00-07:00 if the event is in California).
• Event is a day long event: If the event is happening all day,
  don’t specify a granular hour for the start date. For example, you can use
  2019-08-15 as both the startDate and endDate
  for a day-long event.
• Event start hour isn’t known: If you don’t know the hour for the
  start time, don’t specify a granular hour. For example, you can use
  2019-08-15 as both the startDate and endDate.

  Recommended: "startDate": "2025-07-21"

  Not recommended: "startDate": "2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00"

  Not recommended: "startDate": "2019-07-20T00:00:00"

Examples of how Google interprets dates

Here are some examples of how Google interprets start date and time:

Structured data type definitions

The full definition of Event is available
at schema.org/Event.

You must include the required properties for your content to be eligible for display in enhanced
search results. You can also include the recommended properties to add more information about your
content, which could provide a better user experience.