What Is Event Schema? The Complete Guide (2026)

How Event Schema Appears in Google Search

Google displays qualifying events in a scrollable carousel at the top of search results. Each card in the carousel shows:

• The event name and thumbnail image
• The date and time
• The venue name and city
• A ticket link (if offers.url is present)

These carousels appear for queries like "concerts near me," "Taylor Swift tour dates," or "tech conferences 2026" — making Event schema particularly valuable for venues, promoters, conference organizers, and ticketing platforms. Each event in the carousel links directly to its own URL, so structured data must be present on the individual event page — not a listing page.

Events That Do NOT Qualify for Google Rich Results

Google disqualifies several categories of events from appearing as rich results, regardless of how correctly the schema is implemented:

Note: online-only events can and should still use Event schema for AI search visibility, voice assistants, and knowledge graph enrichment — they just won't appear in Google's visual event carousel.

Required Properties

Google requires three properties for an event to be eligible for rich results. Missing any one of them will prevent the event from appearing in the carousel.

Recommended Properties

These properties are not required for rich result eligibility, but each one improves how your event appears in Google Search and how accurately AI assistants can describe it. Greadme deducts score for missing recommended fields.

eventStatus: Cancelled, Postponed, and Rescheduled Events

When an event's status changes, update the eventStatusproperty immediately rather than removing the schema. Google uses the status to update how your event appears in search results — a cancelled event can still surface with a "Cancelled" badge, which is more helpful to users than a dead page.

Values can be written in short form ("EventCancelled") or full URL form ("https://schema.org/EventCancelled"). Greadme accepts both.

Offers: Ticket Pricing and Availability

The offers property tells Google and search users the ticket price, where to buy, and whether tickets are still available. This is one of the most impactful properties for driving clicks from the event carousel — users see the price range before clicking.

For events with multiple ticket tiers, use an array of Offer objects. For events with a price range (e.g., floor and VIP tickets), use an AggregateOffer with lowPrice and highPrice.

eventAttendanceMode: In-Person, Online, or Hybrid

The eventAttendanceMode property explicitly signals how attendees participate. While optional, it is strongly recommended — especially for hybrid events where both physical and online attendance is possible.

Use the full Schema.org URL form for these values: "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode".

Complete Implementation Examples

1. Standard Physical Event with Tickets

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Event",
  "name": "Jazz & Blues Festival 2026",
  "startDate": "2026-09-12T18:00:00-05:00",
  "endDate": "2026-09-12T23:00:00-05:00",
  "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled",
  "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode",
  "description": "Live jazz and blues, 12 artists, 3 stages.",
  "image": [
    "https://example.com/img/festival-16x9.jpg",
    "https://example.com/img/festival-4x3.jpg",
    "https://example.com/img/festival-1x1.jpg"
  ],
  "location": {
    "@type": "Place",
    "name": "Millennium Park",
    "address": {
      "@type": "PostalAddress",
      "streetAddress": "201 E Randolph St",
      "addressLocality": "Chicago",
      "addressRegion": "IL",
      "postalCode": "60601",
      "addressCountry": "US"
    }
  },
  "organizer": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Chicago Music Foundation",
    "url": "https://example.com"
  },
  "performer": [
    { "@type": "MusicGroup", "name": "The Blue Notes" },
    { "@type": "Person", "name": "Maria Estrada" }
  ],
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "url": "https://example.com/tickets",
    "price": 35,
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
    "validFrom": "2026-06-01T09:00:00-05:00"
  }
}

2. Rescheduled Event

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Event",
  "name": "Annual Developer Conference 2026",
  "startDate": "2026-10-20T09:00:00-07:00",
  "endDate": "2026-10-22T18:00:00-07:00",
  "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventRescheduled",
  "previousStartDate": "2026-09-15T09:00:00-07:00",
  "description": "3-day conference for software developers. Moved to October.",
  "location": {
    "@type": "Place",
    "name": "Moscone Center",
    "address": {
      "@type": "PostalAddress",
      "streetAddress": "747 Howard St",
      "addressLocality": "San Francisco",
      "addressRegion": "CA",
      "postalCode": "94103",
      "addressCountry": "US"
    }
  },
  "organizer": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "DevConf Foundation",
    "url": "https://example.com"
  },
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "url": "https://example.com/tickets",
    "price": 499,
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/PreOrder"
  }
}

3. Free Hybrid Event (In-Person + Online)

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Event",
  "name": "Product Design Summit: The Future of UX",
  "startDate": "2026-11-05T10:00:00-08:00",
  "endDate": "2026-11-05T17:00:00-08:00",
  "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled",
  "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/MixedEventAttendanceMode",
  "isAccessibleForFree": true,
  "description": "Full-day UX summit. Attend in Seattle or stream online free.",
  "image": "https://example.com/img/ux-summit-2026.jpg",
  "location": [
    {
      "@type": "Place",
      "name": "Seattle Convention Center",
      "address": {
        "@type": "PostalAddress",
        "streetAddress": "705 Pike St",
        "addressLocality": "Seattle",
        "addressRegion": "WA",
        "postalCode": "98101",
        "addressCountry": "US"
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "VirtualLocation",
      "url": "https://example.com/live"
    }
  ],
  "organizer": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "UX Collective",
    "url": "https://example.com"
  },
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "url": "https://example.com/register",
    "price": 0,
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock"
  }
}

7 Common Event Schema Mistakes

1. Using Midnight as a Default Start Time

Setting "startDate": "2026-09-15T00:00:00" when the actual start time is unknown is a common mistake. Google interprets this literally as a midnight event. If the time is unknown, use date-only format: "2026-09-15". Greadme flags the midnight pattern as a warning.

2. Putting the Venue Name in the Event Name

"name": "Jazz Festival at Millennium Park"is not wrong per se, but it violates Google's guidance to keep the venue in location.name. Use "name": "Jazz Festival 2026" and put "Millennium Park" in location.name.

3. Promotional Language in the Event Name

"name": "Jazz Festival — Buy Tickets Now! 30% Off" is a policy violation. The namefield must contain the event title only. Greadme detects and warns for keywords like "buy", "sale", "discount", "%", or "$" in the event name.

4. Using a Currency Symbol in the Price

"price": "$49" or "price": "49,00" will cause a Greadme error. Price must be a plain number: 49 or 49.99. The currency goes in the separate priceCurrency field.

5. Missing previousStartDate When EventRescheduled

When you set "eventStatus": "EventRescheduled", you must also include previousStartDate with the original start date. Greadme warns if previousStartDate is absent. Conversely, if you include previousStartDate but forget to set the status to EventRescheduled, Greadme also warns.

6. Using VirtualLocation and Expecting Rich Results

A common misconception: online-only events are automatically excluded from Google's Event rich results carousel. If location is VirtualLocation only (with no physical Place component), Greadme deducts 15 points and shows a warning. Add Event schema anyway for AI assistant visibility — but do not expect the Google carousel.

7. Removing startDate When Cancelling

When an event is cancelled, a natural instinct is to remove or blank out startDate. Don't — Google requires startDate to remain in the markup even for cancelled events. Simply update eventStatus to EventCancelled and leave the rest intact.

Event Schema and AI Search Visibility

AI search platforms — including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, and Perplexity — increasingly source event information from structured data. When a user asks "What concerts are happening in Chicago in September?" these systems extract event details from JSON-LD markup on event pages.

Even for online-only events that don't qualify for Google's visual carousel, complete Event schema significantly improves how accurately AI assistants describe your event: the title, date, location, performer names, and ticket link all become structured, machine-readable facts that AI systems can extract and cite rather than infer from unstructured body text.

For recurring events such as weekly workshops or monthly meetups, use the eventSchedule property with a Schedule object (from Schema.org) to describe the recurrence pattern — this gives AI systems a richer signal than duplicating the same event markup across dozens of individual pages.

How to Validate Your Event Schema

Paste your event page URL into Greadme to validate your Event schema. Greadme checks every required and recommended field, detects promotional language in the event name, flags midnight start time placeholders, warns about VirtualLocation-only events, and verifies that previousStartDate and eventStatus are consistent with each other. The score report shows exactly which fields are missing or misconfigured so you can fix them before submitting to Google.