Standing out in Google searches in 2026 can be pretty tough, given strict SEO requirements and the ever-expansive list of websites that may satisfy a given user's query. Search enhancements are structured data that allow a website to inform Google of certain elements to display along with your search. You have likely seen these before, for example when searching for "Tron Ares" you are greeted with a wealth of ancillary content along with your search results. If we compare that to searching for "SSI CID-1 Spec Sheet", you can see the difference these enhancements can make.
Something to keep in mind
Google ultimately decides what a user sees during a search. Just adding the structured data isn't necessarily enough to ensure it appears every time. I can really only speculate on how exactly the process works, but I would imagine Google will test your structured data against a small selection of users to ensure it doesn't get reported or impact engagement before it becomes generally available.
Regardless, these enhancements don't happen on their own. Sites must provide structured data that the Google crawler can ingest to create the enhancement(s) during a query. That structured data takes a relatively simple form, and in this example, I'll show you how we can inform Google of information on specific book titles to create this style of result:
A quick overview
- Create a JSON-LD code block to add to our site
- Test it via the Google Rich Results test
- Deploy it on the relevant pages
- Profit
Creating the JSON-LD code
Luckily, if you're here specifically to inform Google about books, I've made this easy for you:
Author Details
If you are trying to do something custom however, you can refer to these docs for guidance on this. I do plan on updating that generator for more rich result types so definitely check back soon!
Testing our code
Google provides this page specifically to validate these code blocks. In our case, we want to visit this page, choose the "Code" option, then paste in your generated code block from above. This will tell you instantly if there are any fields missing or information you would benefit from adding. Once we deploy your code block, we can come back here to validate that your URL is providing them for search correctly.
Deploy it on the relevant pages
This will likely be the most time consuming part, you need some way to get this code hosted on your website. In order to work properly, we need to place our excerpt in the <head> section of our site. In Wordpress, some themes allow you to add header code in the theme customizations, but using WPCode allows you to do this for all pages at once. This is the smoothest way to achieve this.
In WPCode, create a new snippet of type "JavaScript", then paste in the code from above. You now need to decide what pages you want it on, but using global headers will make the search enhancements appear the most frequently. It is possible that Google search rankings has some logic for duplicate entries, but I have not seen it affect anything.
Profit
Now, use the test page to validate your URL rather than the code. You should see the elements that appeared when doing the code validation now appearing in this list. Once you see them here, that means they are live and it is now up to Google to show your enhancements to search users.