Google Search Console Mislabeled Many Rich Results Issues As Errors When They Were Warnings

Google has confirmed that it has relabeled many of the rich results issues in Google Search Console from “errors” to “warnings.” So you may see a bunch of errors being moved to the warnings side in the Google Search Console rich results reports. These structured data issues were likely mostly just warnings and not errors but go check the rich results report in a few days to ensure that is the case for your site(s).

This was just a reporting issue, Google Search itself handled them fine but the reports in Search Console had the wrong labels for those rich results issues.

Google posted this on October 25, 2022 saying:

Some structured data issues were mislabeled as errors, when in fact they are warnings. Search Console will relabel them correctly in your reports. As a result, these issues will move from the critical error table to the warning table in your rich result reports. (The issue count in the critical errors table will drop to zero, and that issue will be added to the warnings table with the pre-zero count.) This is strictly a reporting issue and did not affect whether or not a rich result could be displayed in Google Search results.

So if you see a bunch of changes to your rich results report on or after October 25th, that is why.

Update: A bit more from Ryan Levering from Google on this:

I think the word was “some” :P. And it’s actually way cooler than the message belies, imo, because it’s not a patch fix. We’re now calculating it more accurately.

— Ryan Levering (@rrlevering) October 25, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.