According to an announcement made on March 31, Google search will be adopting the SpecialAnnouncement structured data type. Guidelines were published by Google and was using it on COVD-19- related announcements and site owners can start marking up their content with it, despite support still being in development. At this point, at the time of this writing, Google hasn’t announced a specific rollout date for the data type in search results.
The SpecialAnnouncement data type can be applied to information from government and health organizations, schools and other entities that publish urgent updates.
This will help people keep informed about event and quarantine updates, travel restrictions, school and publich transportation closures and more.
Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool is currently showing errors for the announcementLocation property. “This is because the property is new to Schema.org,” Google’s guidelines on the new data type reads. “You can disregard the error, and refer to the documentation for the most up to date set of requirements until we update the tool.”
Schema.org introduced the SpecialAnnouncement data type in version 7.0 of its guidelines, released on March 16, with the coronavirus pandemic in mind. The CovidTestingFacility data type and eventAttendanceMode property were also introduced at the same time.