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Agent LighthouseAgent Lighthouse

    Searches the text of every published page. The evidence sources themselves are not in this index — search all of them on the trusted sources page.

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    structured-data/howto-schema

    HowTo schema (retired rich result)

    What it checks

    Whether any sampled page, of any page type, still publishes HowTo structured data (JSON-LD, including @graph and arrays, or microdata).

    Numbered steps without markup are no longer a finding. The old audit failed them and asked the owner to add the markup.

    State Result
    HowTo markup on at least one sampled page warn, priority low
    no HowTo markup notApplicable

    Why it matters

    Mechanism: Google showed How-to rich results from HowTo markup. The claim this audit tests is that Google retired them and that no AI vendor reads the markup.

    Evidence

    • Google: “As of September 13, Google Search no longer shows How-to rich results on desktop, which means this result type is now deprecated.” — Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results (verified 2026-10-18)
    • The same post: “there’s no need to proactively remove it. Structured data that’s not being used does not cause problems for Search.”
    • Google removed the How-to structured data documentation on 2023-09-14 — Search Central updates (verified 2026-10-18)
    • No AI vendor documents reading HowTo markup.

    Limits

    Schema.org still defines HowTo, and the markup does no harm. The message says removal is optional.

    How it scores

    Grade: D — the only documented consumer was retired by its operator. An obsolete audit carries weight 0 and never returns fail (sunset.test.ts; Audit.toCheckResult lowers a stray fail to warn). It does not move any score.

    Example finding

    A tutorial page carries {"@type":"HowTo","step":[…]}. The report says Google retired How-to rich results and that removing the markup is optional.

    Sources