Google’s relationship with structured data has always evolved, but 2025, 2026 marks a notably visible shift: Search Console is trimming what it reports, tests, and exposes via its API for multiple schema types.
For SEO teams and publishers, the practical impact is less about rankings and more about observability, what you can validate, monitor, and export. Below is what changed, what’s next, and how to adjust workflows and reporting.
What Google is changing in Search Console (and why it matters)
In November 2025, Google stated it will “remove support for the structured data types in Search Console and its API” starting January 2026. This is an explicit reduction of Search Console’s structured data surface area, not a minor UI tweak.
These changes affect three main places SEOs rely on: Search Console rich result reporting, the Rich Results Test, and Search appearance filters (plus the Search Console API and Bulk Data Export for some fields).
The core implication: some markup can still exist on pages, but Google may no longer provide dedicated diagnostics and reporting for it. That can raise the effort needed to troubleshoot eligibility, confirm valid implementation, or trend performance by rich result appearance.
The June 2025 backdrop: “simplifying” results and phasing out low-use features
On June 12, 2025, Google framed a broader initiative as “simplifying the Google Search results page,” explaining that it is phasing out some structured-data-powered features because they’re “not commonly used” and “no longer providing significant additional value.”
That rationale signals a product direction: Google is prioritizing consistency and reduced SERP complexity over maintaining a long tail of specialized enhancements. In practice, that means fewer schema types will map to visible, reportable search features.
Google also clarified on June 12, 2025 that the change “won’t affect how pages are ranked.” Even so, losing a rich result enhancement (or losing the ability to measure it cleanly) can still influence click-through rates, content strategy decisions, and ROI calculations.
September 2025 removals: six structured data types lose reporting and testing
On September 8, 9, 2025, Google removed Search Console rich result reporting, the Rich Results Test, and Search appearance filters for six structured data types: Course Info, Claim Review, Estimated Salary, Learning Video, Special Announcement, and Vehicle Listing.
Industry coverage, including Search Engine Roundtable’s summary of the official list and dates and Search Engine Journal’s reporting, highlighted how immediate the operational effect was: teams could no longer rely on Search Console’s dedicated rich result reports or the Rich Results Test output for those types.
This matters even if a site still publishes the markup. Without those product surfaces, debugging becomes more dependent on schema validation tooling, log-level analysis, and general Search Console performance data rather than type-specific enhancement reports.
API timeline: support continues briefly, then sunsets
In September 2025, Google confirmed that the Search Console API would keep supporting those six deprecated types only through December 2025. In other words, even after UI/reporting removal, some API access persisted temporarily.
This created a short transition window for engineering and analytics teams to migrate dashboards, revise ETL pipelines, and communicate measurement changes to stakeholders, before the API fields became unavailable.
Search Engine Journal also emphasized the phased nature of the rollout: first, stop reporting and testing in the UI/tools; then, end API support on a defined schedule. That sequencing is important because it can mask breakage, pipelines may “work” until they suddenly don’t.
Bulk Data Export and BigQuery: the hidden breaking change (`NULL` fields)
On October 1, 2025, Google updated Bulk Data Export so deprecated “search appearance” fields for the impacted types are reported as NULL. That change can silently break dashboards, scheduled queries, and monitoring alerts that assume a non-null appearance dimension.
In September 2025, Google provided a BigQuery example to show how queries may need updating because deprecated appearance fields can become NULL. For analysts, this is a classic schema-evolution problem: the column may still exist, but its informational value is gone.
Practically, teams need to audit Looker Studio/BI models, SQL where clauses, and joins that filter on search appearance. If your reporting slices by rich result type, you may need fallback groupings (page type, template, URL pattern, query class) or a separate schema coverage dataset to maintain comparable trendlines.
Practice Problem: deprecation notice, January 2026 removal, and docs updates
Between November 5, 2025 and January 2026, Google published a deprecation notice for Practice Problem structured data. Google specified that “Starting in January 2026” it would be removed from Search Console rich result reporting, the Rich Results Test, and Search appearance filters, while API support continues “through January 2026.”
On January 6, 2026, Google removed documentation for the Practice Problem structured data type (recorded as an official docs update entry). Documentation removal is often the final step that confirms a type is no longer actively supported for its prior Search experience.
As Search Engine Journal noted in later coverage, this aligns with a broader pattern; it also attributed a comment to John Mueller that “markup types come and go.” For implementation teams, that’s a reminder to treat structured data support as a moving target that requires periodic governance and maintenance.
Not everything is disappearing: Dataset and Book actions clarifications
Google’s November 5, 2025 documentation clarifications help separate “Search Console reporting changes” from “schema is useless.” For example, Google clarified Dataset structured data is used only by Dataset Search (not regular Google Search).
That distinction matters for organizations that publish research data or catalogs: Dataset markup may still be strategically valuable, but expectations should be aligned with the correct Google product (Dataset Search) rather than standard web search results.
Google also removed the deprecation banner from Book actions documentation because a feature still uses it in Google Search. This is a useful counterpoint: the trimming is targeted, not an across-the-board rollback of structured data, and some features remain active and worth maintaining.
How to adapt: measurement, QA, and stakeholder communication
First, update measurement plans. If you were tracking performance by rich result “search appearance” for the deprecated types, plan a clean break in reporting starting September/October 2025 (UI removal and NULL export behavior) and again at the API sunset windows (December 2025 and January 2026, depending on type).
Second, adjust QA processes. With fewer type-specific Search Console enhancement reports and less Rich Results Test coverage, quality assurance should lean more on schema validators, unit tests in your publishing pipeline, and template-level checks to prevent malformed JSON-LD from shipping.
Third, communicate clearly that rankings are not the direct target. Google’s June 12, 2025 statement that the change “won’t affect how pages are ranked” should be part of stakeholder updates, while also explaining that visibility, CTR, and analytics segmentation may change due to reduced SERP features and reduced reporting.
Google trimming structured data support in Search Console is best understood as an observability change paired with a SERP simplification strategy. The most disruptive effects often show up not in rankings, but in lost diagnostics, disappearing filters, and analytics pipelines that relied on search appearance dimensions.
Teams that respond well will treat this as a planned migration: audit which markup types are impacted, rewrite BigQuery/BI logic to handle NULL appearances, and re-baseline KPIs. As Google put it, some features are being removed because they’re not commonly used, and as John Mueller’s remark suggests, markup types come and go, so resilient SEO operations should be designed for change.
