Nutritionist Recipe Schema on Squarespace

The 2026 retirements are easy to confuse. On 2026-05-07 Google retired FAQ rich results in general Search⁴, restricting FAQ rich-result eligibility to government and health authorities. HowTo rich results were similarly downgraded — still parseable, but no longer reliably surfacing as the step-by-step rich snippet. Recipe was not part of those retirements. The Recipe rich-result type was reaffirmed by Google's Search Central documentation through the policy update, and the recipe carousel continues to be one of the most visually prominent rich-result formats on mobile Search.

The practical implication for credentialed dietitian sites: Recipe schema is still worth the engineering effort, and Recipe-bearing pages still earn citation lift in AI Overviews and the recipe carousel. FAQPage schema should not be added to dietitian recipe pages or program pages (it triggers the post-retirement downgrade); Recipe schema should be added to every credentialed recipe post on the blog. The two are independent decisions with opposite answers in 2026, which trips up dietitians who have been told blanket "schema is good" advice.

The credential signal does not change whether the recipe appears in the basic carousel — Recipe rich results are not gated by credential. What the credential signal changes is the priority Google's helpful-content layer and the AI-engine retrieval pass assign to the recipe relative to food-blog competitors targeting the same query. A dietitian's "PCOS-friendly breakfast bowl" with credentialed author wrapping and a clinical-context introduction ("Polycystic Ovary Syndrome benefits from low-glycaemic, protein-forward breakfast patterns; this recipe is built around those principles") outranks and out-cites a food-blog "Easy PCOS breakfast bowl!" with no credential and a story about the author's pet.

The Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines⁵ are explicit that nutrition content tied to health claims sits in YMYL, and the rater guidance for YMYL content emphasises author expertise. The mechanism that converts rater-side guidance into ranking is indirect but consistent: the patterns that earn high rater scores correlate with the patterns AI Overviews and ChatGPT cite. The credentialed-author wrapping on a recipe is the cheapest, most repeatable lift available to a dietitian publishing recipe content on Squarespace, and it lifts every recipe on the blog at once rather than requiring per-post work.

The schema.org Recipe type² inherits from CreativeWork and HowTo. The HowTo inheritance is why recipeInstructions is structured as a HowToStep array — each step has a position, a name (optional), and a text. The CreativeWork inheritance is what carries the author, dateModified, and publisher fields the YMYL E-E-A-T pass reads.

 <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Recipe", "name": "PCOS-Friendly Greek Yogurt Breakfast Bowl", "image": "https://yourpractice.com/recipes/pcos-yogurt-bowl.jpg", "author": { "@id": "https://yourpractice.com/#practitioner" }, "datePublished": "2026-05-18", "recipeYield": "1 serving", "prepTime": "PT5M", "totalTime": "PT5M", "recipeCategory": "Breakfast", "recipeIngredient": [ "3/4 cup plain Greek yogurt (2% milkfat)", "2 tablespoons chia seeds", "1/2 cup mixed berries", "1 tablespoon almond butter" ], "recipeInstructions": [ { "@type": "HowToStep", "text": "Spoon the yogurt into a bowl. Stir in the chia seeds." }, { "@type": "HowToStep", "text": "Top with the berries and drizzle the almond butter over the top." } ], "nutrition": { "@type": "NutritionInformation", "servingSize": "1 bowl", "calories": "320 calories", "proteinContent": "22 g", "carbohydrateContent": "26 g", "fatContent": "14 g", "fiberContent": "8 g" } } </script> 

The author field is the dietitian-specific lever. By referring to the practitioner's Person schema by @id (the same Person used on the MedicalBusiness graph⁶), every recipe inherits the practitioner's hasCredential and knowsAbout signals without repeating them. The Person schema lives in the site-wide header Code Injection; recipe posts only need to reference it. This pattern keeps the per-recipe JSON-LD lean and the credential signal consistent across the entire blog.

The Squarespace-specific gotcha is the difference between site-wide Code Injection (Settings > Advanced > Code Injection > Header) and post-level Code Injection (per-post settings > Advanced > Page Header / Page Footer). The MedicalBusiness + Person graph belongs in site-wide because it applies to every page on the site; the Recipe block belongs in post-level because it is per-post content. Mixing the two breaks the credential reference: a site-wide Recipe block would claim the entire site is one recipe, which is incorrect; a post-level MedicalBusiness block would re-declare the practice on every post, which is duplicative and can trigger structured-data warnings.

The most common 2026 misconception is "Recipe schema = recipe carousel inclusion". The eligibility-vs-selection distinction is real and consistent across Google's rich-result types: schema makes a page eligible, selection is competitive, and selection weights the schema accuracy plus the underlying content quality plus the freshness signal plus the image quality. A dietitian site shipping Recipe schema on every post but using the same stock image across ten recipes will see lower selection rates than the same site shipping unique, high-quality images that pass Recipe's image-quality threshold.

The honest claim for a credentialed RD blog is: Recipe schema with NutritionInformation and a credential-attached author lifts every recipe's structured-data eligibility, plugs the recipes into the practitioner's broader credentialed-source signal for AI citation, and produces measurable rich-result and AI Overviews citation lift over a 6-12 month horizon. The lift is structural rather than instantaneous, and the practitioner sites that have shipped it earliest will hold the citation positions longest.