Google has officially announced the end of its support for the SpecialAnnouncements structured data format, a schema introduced during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Support for this data type will be fully discontinued by July 31, 2025, marking the quiet retirement of a tool that played a critical role during an extraordinary time.
Background: Why SpecialAnnouncements Were Introduced
In April 2020, Google launched the SpecialAnnouncement structured data as a beta feature to help organizations share urgent, pandemic-related updates. The world was grappling with rapid changes—lockdowns, evolving store hours, new health policies—and businesses, schools, and governments needed a way to communicate those changes quickly to users.
This structured data allowed website owners to mark up pages with important announcements like revised operating hours, travel restrictions, health advisories, and event cancellations. It enabled Google Search to better understand and, in some cases, highlight this urgent content directly in search results.
Interestingly, despite its usefulness, the SpecialAnnouncement schema never moved out of beta. It remained an experimental feature throughout its life cycle—a strong indication that Google always saw it as a temporary, situational tool rather than a permanent addition to its structured data ecosystem.
Why Google Is Deprecating It
The decision to phase out SpecialAnnouncements is not surprising. COVID-19 is no longer classified as a global health emergency by most governments, and life has largely returned to pre-pandemic norms. With fewer pandemic-related updates needed, maintaining support for a specialized, one-use schema no longer makes practical sense for Google.
Moreover, the landscape of structured data has evolved. Google's focus now seems to be on enhancing more general-purpose structured data types that provide lasting, wide-ranging benefits across industries—such as FAQ, How-To, Event, and Product schemas—rather than maintaining specialized formats tied to temporary circumstances.
What Happens If You Still Use It?
Google has confirmed that continuing to use SpecialAnnouncement markup on your site will not harm your website’s search performance. However, it will become functionally useless: Google Search will no longer recognize or process this structured data after the cutoff date.
In short, the markup will be ignored, just like unsupported or deprecated tags. It's generally good practice to remove outdated structured data to keep your site clean and maintain best SEO practices, but it’s not urgent or harmful if you leave it lingering for a while.
Final Thoughts: What This Says About Structured Data's Future
The rise and quiet retirement of SpecialAnnouncements underline an important lesson for SEO practitioners and developers: structured data strategies must be flexible and adaptable. Not every markup introduced by Google is meant to last forever. Sometimes, structured data is situational—crafted for a specific need at a specific moment in time.
Going forward, businesses should focus on adopting long-term structured data types that enrich user experience, provide rich results, and support Google's broader goals around helpfulness and information accessibility.
The pandemic might have faded from the headlines, but it left an undeniable impact on how fast digital tools like structured data can evolve—and be retired—based on real-world needs.
