Google declares war on online events and deprecates their structured data attributes
In June 2025 Google removed from its documentation every sign or trace of eventAttendanceMode.
During the period when in-person events could scarcely be held anywhere in the world, Google actually recommended using those formats to announce online events.
After that, those attributes were used for any online event; and even though in-person events are possible again, online events are here to stay. In fact, many events now offer both an in-person and an online option.
However, it was possible to mark it for Google through structured data until June 2025.
In the image above you can see that on 3 June 2025 (screenshot below) Google still listed it among the properties and even included those attributes in its examples. Yet 20 days later, on 23 June 2025 (screenshot above) it had vanished from the documentation altogether.
The curious thing isn’t that it disappeared from the docs; it’s that—try it yourself—if you include that attribute in your structured data, Google doesn’t flag it as an error: it simply stops detecting it as structured data at all, making it much harder to notice an unannounced change.
Let’s look at the different examples
eventAttendanceMode
onlineWhere you can see that it simply ceases to be an element:
eventAttendanceMode
offlineWhere you can see that it is happily detected as an element:
eventAttendanceMode
Where you can see that it is happily detected as an element (it doesn’t even catch the mistake):
Given the way this attribute has been removed without notice and the way it has disappeared from the test, one might suspect either a hurried change of direction or that Google has decided online events no longer make sense in its SERPs—or at least not via rich snippets. I’m surprised by the lack of transparency in the documentation regarding an attribute that was with us for three years.
Well, it seems they haven't completely removed the mixed option (both online and in-person event), which allows you to set a virtualLocation:
"eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/MixedEventAttendanceMode",
"eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/MixedEventAttendanceMode",
"eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled",
"location": [{
"@type": "VirtualLocation",
"url": "https://operaonline.stream5.com/"
},
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