What's the Difference Between a Plain Link and a Rich Result?
A plain search result shows your page title, web address, and a sentence or two from your page. A rich result shows all of that plus your star rating, review count, current price, and whether the item is in stock -- all before the customer clicks. That extra information reduces hesitation and significantly increases the number of people who visit your product page.
The difference isn't magic -- it's a small block of code on your product pages called product schema (or "product information labels") that tells Google exactly what each product is, what it costs, and what customers think of it. Google reads those labels and uses them to build the richer result. Without the labels, Google can't show that information because it doesn't have it in a reliable, machine-readable format.
What the Numbers Actually Look Like
The Three Types of Label That Matter for Online Shops
There are three pieces of information Google is most interested in for product pages. Each one corresponds to a type of label you add to the page:
The product label describes the item itself -- name, brand, description, photos, and an identifier (like a barcode or SKU). The offer label gives the commercial detail -- current price in pounds, whether it's in stock or not, and who is selling it. The review label tells Google about your customer ratings -- the overall star score and how many reviews it's based on. All three work together. You can add them one at a time, but the full package is what unlocks the richest result in Google search.
Five Steps to Adding Product Labels to Your Website
Write down all the key details for each product
Before adding any code, collect what you need: the full product name, brand, a clear description, your current price in GBP, whether it's in stock, any barcode or product code, and your current average star rating and review count. The more complete this information, the richer the result Google can show.
Add the product label code to each product page
The labels go in the head section of each product page as a small block of code. If you're on Shopify or WooCommerce, there are free plugins and apps that generate this automatically from your product data -- though they often need checking for errors. A developer can add the code manually in under an hour per page if you need it done properly from scratch.
Make sure prices and stock status stay accurate
Google takes product information labels seriously. If your label says a product is £49 and in stock, but the page says £59 or "sold out," Google may suppress the rich result entirely or reduce your visibility. Make sure whatever system manages your prices and inventory also updates the labels -- most ecommerce platforms do this automatically if the labels are set up correctly.
Check your labels with Google's free testing tool
Google has a free tool called the Rich Results Test. Paste your product page URL into it, and it will show you exactly what information Google can read -- and flag any errors. Run this check before and after adding labels so you can see exactly what changed. It also gives you a preview of what the rich result will look like.
Watch your click rates over the following weeks
Google Search Console shows how many times your pages appeared in search results and how often people clicked on them. After adding product labels, check whether your click rate for product pages improves over the following two to three weeks. You should see it move upward as the richer result starts appearing. For AI search, try asking ChatGPT a specific product question ("best oak dining table UK under £700") and see whether your product appears in the answer.
How Long Before You See a Difference?
"Your competitors' products are already showing ratings, prices, and stock status in Google. Yours don't have to keep showing as a plain link."
What About AI Search Recommendations?
More people are using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI to research what to buy before visiting any website. When someone asks "what's a good oak dining table under £700 in the UK?", those tools are looking for products with complete, verified information. Products with proper labels -- price, brand, availability, customer ratings -- match those questions precisely. Products without labels are text that the AI can't assess with confidence.
Getting your products into AI recommendations isn't just a future concern. It's happening now, and the businesses who have their product information structured correctly are the ones showing up in those answers. The gap between them and everyone else is a small block of code.
The Bottom Line for Online Shops
If you're selling products online and your Google search results still look like plain blue links, you're giving away clicks to competitors who have taken an hour to add the right labels to their product pages. This isn't a complex technical project -- it's a routine update that most website platforms can help with. And the improvement in click rates starts showing within a few weeks.
Want to Know What Your Product Pages Are Missing?
We'll check your product pages and tell you in plain English what labels are missing and what they're costing you in clicks.
Questions From Small Business Owners
Yes. Products with complete information labels get 20 to 40 percent more clicks because the extra detail -- star ratings, price, stock status -- shows before anyone visits your site. Customers who find you through an AI recommendation convert at around 14 percent, compared to around 3 percent for people clicking a plain search result. For most shops, the improvement in clicks pays for the setup cost within a few weeks.
Product labels on your website support Google Shopping, but for the paid Shopping listings you also need a Google Merchant Centre account linked to your product data. For free organic rich results -- the star ratings and pricing shown in standard search -- product labels on your pages alone are sufficient and you don't need Merchant Centre for that.
Some platforms add basic product labels automatically, but they often contain errors or missing details -- particularly around pricing currency, availability status, and star ratings. It's worth checking what your platform has generated using Google's free Rich Results Test to see if there are gaps. Many shops find their automatically-generated labels are missing key fields.
The extra information typically starts showing in Google results within two to three weeks of the labels being correctly in place. You can check whether your pages are eligible before then using Google's free Rich Results Test, which shows a preview of how your product will appear in search.