Structured Data

Video Rich Results

Search results showing a video thumbnail, duration and key moments, driven by VideoObject markup.

Video rich results are search listings that show a thumbnail, duration and sometimes jump-to-moment links instead of a plain blue link. They are driven by VideoObject structured data, which must supply a thumbnail URL, upload date and duration — and the video has to be genuinely on the page, not merely mentioned.

Definition

VideoObject describes the video itself: name, description, thumbnailUrl, uploadDate, duration in ISO 8601, and a contentUrl or embedUrl.

Adding a Clip or SeekToAction enables key moments, which let a searcher jump straight to a labelled section — the closest thing to ranking for several queries with one video.

Why It Matters

A thumbnail occupies far more of the results page than a text listing and is markedly more clickable. The markup is the only way to be eligible for it.

Example

{
  "@type": "VideoObject",
  "name": "Fixing CLS",
  "uploadDate": "2026-04-02",
  "duration": "PT6M12S",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://example.com/thumb.jpg"
}

Key moments are the part most sites skip

The basic video result — thumbnail, duration, title — comes from a correctly marked-up VideoObject. Key moments, which let a searcher jump straight to a labelled section, come from adding Clip nodes or a SeekToAction, and almost nobody does.

They are worth the effort because they multiply what one video can rank for. A twelve-minute tutorial with six labelled clips is six answers rather than one, each addressable from search.

The labels have to be honest — a clip described as covering something it does not is a bad experience Google can measure — and the timestamps have to be right, which means maintaining them when the video is re-edited.

How SlapMyWeb checks this

The audit validates VideoObject markup and reports missing required fields — thumbnailUrl, uploadDate and an ISO 8601 duration are the ones most often absent. It also checks that a video element or embed is actually present on the page, since markup describing a video that is not there is ineligible regardless of how complete it is.

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