Movies

What a film site actually gets from markup: a snippet that can carry genre, original language, a short description, a family-viewing indicator, age restriction, running time, release date and year, the names of actors, directors, producers and composers, and the production company.

The rule that governs how to write it

Yandex states that text generated from the marked-up information can exceed the allowed snippet size. When it does, the snippet keeps only the most important information, or the part most relevant to the query.

Two consequences follow. First, marking up more fields does not produce a longer snippet — it produces a better-informed selection. Second, the selection is query-dependent, so the same film page shows different facts to someone searching for the director than to someone searching for the title.

What this means in practice

There is no point optimising the order of properties or trying to control which appear. The productive work is making sure each field is accurate and complete, so that whichever subset Yandex chooses is correct. A missing release year is a fact that can never be selected; a wrong one is worse than absent.

The pattern that generalises

This is how Yandex treats enhanced snippets generally: you supply facts, the engine decides which to show, per query, within a size limit. The same logic governs product, software and recipe snippets. Anyone approaching structured data as a way to write the search result is working from the wrong model — it is a way to make the page’s facts available for selection.

Implementation reminders

One film per page, each person in their own element, and aggregateRating only with both ratingValue and bestRating present. Validate in Yandex’s own tool, which checks against its service requirements rather than the open standard.