Video (VideoObject, Clip, BroadcastEvent) structured data
While Google tries to automatically understand details about your video, you can influence the information that’s shown in video results, such as the description, thumbnail URL, upload date, and duration, by marking up your video with VideoObject. Adding video structured data to your watch pages can also make it easier for Google to find your video. Videos can appear in several different places on Google, including the main search results page, Video mode, Google Images, and Google Discover.
Based on how you mark up your watch page, your videos may also be eligible for the following specific video features:
Video features
LIVE badge: Get a LIVE badge added to your video by marking your video with BroadcastEvent. The LIVE badge can be applied to any public video that is live-streamed for any length of time. Here are a few examples:
The key moments feature is a way for users to navigate video segments like chapters in a book, which can help users engage more deeply with your content. Google Search tries to automatically detect the segments in your video and show key moments to users, without any effort on your part. Alternatively, you can tell Google about the important points of your video. We will prioritize key moments set by you, either through structured data or the YouTube description.
If your video is embedded on your web page or you’re running a video platform, there are two ways that you can enable key moments:
Clip structured data: Specify the exact start and end time to each segment, and what label to display for each segment. This is supported in all languages where Google Search is available.
SeekToAction structured data: Tell Google where timestamps typically go in your URL structure, so that Google can automatically identify key moments and link users to those points within the video. This is supported for the following languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Turkish, Korean, Dutch, and Russian.
If your video is hosted on YouTube, you can specify the exact timestamps and labels in the video description on YouTube. Check out the best practices for marking timestamps in YouTube descriptions. This is supported in all languages where Google Search is available. If you want to enable Video Chapters on YouTube, follow these additional guidelines.
To opt out of the key moments feature completely (including any efforts Google may make to show key moments automatically for your video), use the nosnippetmeta tag.
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.
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).
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.
Video markup unlocks a surface most clients already have content for. Adding duration, thumbnail and upload date to existing video pages is one of the highest-return technical tasks we run.
