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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/speakable-schema

    Speakable schema

    What it checks

    Google Assistant uses the speakable property to pick which sentences of a news article it reads aloud on Assistant-enabled devices. Without it, the assistant has to guess, and often vocalizes navigation or boilerplate instead of your headline and summary. Mark the headline and summary with cssSelector on your Article or WebPage node.

    (The pre-rewrite description named Alexa and Siri as consumers. That claim was fabricated and is quoted, with its refutation, in the rewrite section below.)

    Why it matters

    Google Assistant answers a spoken news query by reading article text aloud with text-to-speech, and speakable names the sections it reads. An article without it has its excerpt chosen for it — often from navigation or boilerplate, rather than from the headline and summary.

    Evidence

    speakable selects the sentences an assistant reads aloud

    • Google Search Central’s speakable page, last updated 2025-12-10, names the consumer and the behaviour. “When users ask for news about a specific topic, the Google Assistant returns up to three articles from around the web and supports audio playback using TTS for sections in the article with speakable structured data” — developers.google.com/…/speakable (verified 2026-08-24)
    • The property is defined by schema.org on Article and WebPage, with cssSelector and xpath as the two addressing forms, both valid as a single string or an array — schema.org/speakable (verified 2026-08-21)

    Limits

    The same Google page states “This feature is in beta and subject to change”, and scopes it to “users in the U.S. that have Google Home devices set to English, and publishers that publish content in English”, news content only. No other consumer exists: Apple’s Applebot documentation names exactly one schema.org property, isAccessibleForFree, and no speakable (support.apple.com/…/119829, verified 2026-08-21); Amazon publishes no speakable documentation at all. The widely repeated claim that Alexa and Siri read speakable has no primary source, and a regression test now asserts that neither name appears in this audit’s copy.

    The consumer is also on a stated migration path: Google announced on 2025-08-20 that “Over time, Gemini for Home will replace Google Assistant on existing speakers and displays”, with no successor statement about speakable. If that transition completes without one, this audit loses its consumer entirely rather than one grade.

    How it scores

    Google names the consuming agent on a live page, which is documented consumer behaviour, but the same page calls the feature beta and limits it to one country, one language and one content type. A vendor feature its own vendor labels provisional is a grade-B mechanism, not a grade-A one.

    Sources