Generate valid VideoObject JSON-LD structured data for your videos. Help Google display rich video results with thumbnails, duration badges, and descriptions.
OneStepToRank monitors your structured data in production, alerts you when schema breaks, and tracks how your rich results change over time.
Get StartedVideo schema markup uses the VideoObject type from Schema.org to describe video content on your website in a structured, machine-readable format. When you add VideoObject JSON-LD to a page, you tell Google exactly what your video is about, how long it lasts, when it was published, and where its thumbnail and source files live. Without this markup, search engines rely on heuristics to detect and understand embedded videos, which often leads to missing or inaccurate information in search results.
Google uses VideoObject data to power several search features: video rich snippets that show a thumbnail with a play button and duration badge directly in web results, the Videos tab in Google Search, the video carousel that appears for relevant queries, and Google Discover recommendations. Pages with valid video schema are eligible for all of these enhanced placements, giving your content significantly more visibility than a plain blue link.
When Google detects valid VideoObject schema on your page, it can display your result with a prominent video thumbnail, a duration badge overlaid on the image, the upload date, and an expanded description. This format occupies more visual space in search results and draws the eye immediately, resulting in measurably higher click-through rates. In mobile search results, video rich snippets are even more prominent, often taking up most of the visible screen above the fold.
The required properties for video rich results are name, thumbnailUrl, and uploadDate. Google strongly recommends also including description, duration (in ISO 8601 format), and either contentUrl (the direct video file) or embedUrl (an embeddable player URL). Including all of these gives Google the most complete picture and maximizes your chances of appearing in video-specific search features.
If your videos are hosted on YouTube, the platform already generates structured data automatically. However, adding VideoObject schema to your own website pages that embed YouTube videos serves a different purpose: it associates the video with your domain and page content, increasing the chance that your page appears as the video result rather than the YouTube URL alone. This keeps traffic flowing to your site instead of to YouTube.
For self-hosted videos (MP4 files on your own server or CDN), schema markup is essential. There is no platform providing metadata on your behalf, so Google depends entirely on your structured data to understand and index the video. Use the contentUrl property to point to the direct video file and the thumbnailUrl property for a representative image. Without these, self-hosted videos are frequently overlooked by search engines entirely.
Implementing video schema on your website is straightforward:
<head> section or before the closing </body> tag on the page where the video appears. Each page with a video should have its own VideoObject markup.Use this generator alongside our Local Business Schema Generator if your videos belong to a business site, our Article Schema Generator for blog posts that contain videos, and our FAQ Schema Generator to add FAQ structured data to the same pages.
Video schema markup (VideoObject) is structured data you add to your website's HTML that tells search engines about your video content. It describes the video's name, description, thumbnail, duration, upload date, and other metadata in a machine-readable format. Google uses this information to display rich video results with thumbnails, duration badges, and descriptions directly in search results.
YouTube automatically provides structured data for videos hosted on its platform, so Google can already understand those videos. However, adding VideoObject schema to your own website pages that embed YouTube videos helps Google associate the video with your page, increasing the chance your page appears as a video result rather than just the YouTube URL. For self-hosted videos, schema markup is essential since there is no platform providing metadata on your behalf.
Google requires three properties at minimum for video rich results: name (the title of the video), thumbnailUrl (a URL pointing to the video thumbnail image), and uploadDate (the date the video was first published in ISO 8601 format). Google also strongly recommends including description, duration, contentUrl or embedUrl, and expires if the video will become unavailable after a certain date.
Yes. Adding VideoObject structured data significantly improves your chances of appearing in Google Video search results and the Videos tab on the main search page. Google uses the schema to understand what your video is about, display an accurate thumbnail, show the duration, and present other metadata. Pages with valid video schema are eligible for the video carousel, video rich snippets, and the dedicated Video search vertical.