Google Announces Home Activities Rich Results

Google has announced a new Rich Result that corresponds to home activity events. Home Activities rich results correspond to online events. Google will show Home Activities rich results when an appropriate search query triggers it.

Home Activities Rich Results

The new rich results are currently limited to fitness related searches. It’s only available on mobile devices at this time.

In order to be eligible for home activities, websites must add either Event or Video structured data.

Event structured data is appropriate for online events that are going to happen. Video structured data is appropriate for published videos.

According to the announcement:

Events must be virtual events, not physical events. In the Event structured data, make sure to:

Set eventAttendanceMode to OnlineEventAttendanceMode.

Use the VirtualLocation type for the location property.

Add the location.url property.

Specify the correct timezone. Because there’s no physical location to verify the correct time, setting the right timezone is critical for online events.

For videos, focus on adding the description and duration properties, as these help Google understand what the video is about.

If your video is an upcoming live stream you can add both types of markup (Video and Event), but you don’t have to.

However, if you use Video markup for the live stream, we recommended adding the BroadcastEvent properties and following the LIVE badge guidelines.

Mark Events as Online Only

The events structured data is relevant to actual in-person events as well as virtual events. Because of Covid-19 and how users are consuming more video events from home, there are additional properties and types that need to be used.

Event organizers have to use the VirtualLocation type and also set the eventAttendanceMode property to OnlineEventAttendanceMode.

LIVE Badge Guidelines

The LIVE badge guidleines is a reference to requirements to refrain from using vulgar or offensive language in the structured data. It also requires using the Indexing API for live streams https://developers.google.com/search/apis/indexing-api/v3/quickstart

There is additional documentation for the BroadcastEvent structured data in Google’s developer pages that list required properties.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/video#broadcast-event

Required properties are:

• publication (date of live stream)
• publication.endDate
• publication.isLiveBroadcast
• publication.startDate

Home Activities Rich Results

Google is currently showing these rich results for fitness related activities only. The examples of search queries that trigger these rich results on a mobile device are “online exercise” and “yoga at home.”

Where these results are shown depends on the time zone indicated in the structured data.

Google did not indicate if they were going to expand this to other kinds of home activities beyond fitness.

This may be helpful for local gyms, martial arts schools, yoga studios, dance classes and any other fitness related online activities.

Citations

Read the official announcement here: Home Activities

Events Structured Data Requirements