Starting in mid-December, Google seemed to start showing more product rich results in the search results for many snippets even if those pages did not have product structured data on them. Brodie Clark first posted about it on January 12th (which we covered in our newsletter the day after) and Lily Ray and her co-worker, and so does Glenn Gabe posted screenshots of Google Search Console's performance report showing the uptick in mid-December.
Here is what it looks like in the search results, from Brodie:
Here is a chart from Lily Ray showing this show up in the Google Search Console appearance report for product rich results starting on December 13, 2021.
In fact, many are seeing the uptick mid-December:
New opportunities for publishers in producing products reviews. These two sites started getting traffic from Product Rich Results even when there wasn't any Product-Related Schema Markup on-page. The gains align perfectly with Google's Reviews Update, launched on Dec. 2021. pic.twitter.com/QRndiViTzE
— D@RWIN (@DasfNYC) February 4, 2022
Yup, turns out this is pretty widespread.
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) February 4, 2022
Just checked a handful of clients who write product reviews/roundups *but don't use Product schema on those articles,* and they're all seeing a huge uptick in "Product Rich Results" on those pages in GSC beginning on Dec 12/13. https://t.co/0DMFjXGjUh pic.twitter.com/AQJzZ7Hlpd
I see it too across several sites with reviews content. Note, many of the pages do have product structured data, but some don't. So is this just a reporting change in GSC, or did Google start including product rich snippets for more reviews content then? pic.twitter.com/ZVqGBCUqH1
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 4, 2022
As you can see, Daniel Waisberg from Google said he will look into it. But it just seems like Google, in mid-December, started to show more product rich results for pages that do not have markup. We know Google does not need structured data to do this, but the structured data makes it easier for Google to do it - but it isn't always necessary. In fact, the help docs say "Product results - Items marked up with Product schema.org markup, or identified as a product result by some other mechanism." So this is "by some other mechanism."
It is also worth noting that Google did make a change to how it measures evaluates and reports errors in Product structured data. Google wrote this in December 2021, and said "as a result, you may see changes in the number of Product entities and issues reported for your property, as well as a change in severity of some issues from errors to warnings."
So again, this all seems to line up and you may start noticing more product rich results, espesially around pricing, over the past couple of months.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
