Is it true that there are no restrictions on the number of items in recipe carousels?

What exactly does Google say about the limits of recipe carousels?

The official statement confirms that there is no technical limit on the number of items you can structure with the ItemList markup for your recipes. Contrary to what many believed, Google does not restrict the number of items that can appear in the results carousel.

Specifically, if you have a collection of 50 chocolate cake recipes, nothing prevents you from marking all of them in structured data and grouping them in a single ItemList. Crawling and indexing will not block beyond an arbitrary threshold.

Why was this question raised in the first place?

Many SEOs observed that carousels displayed in the SERPs rarely contain more than 10-15 visible elements. This observation fueled the hypothesis of a limit imposed by Google, either at the level of visual display or at the level of markup processing.

In reality, the confusion arises because Google selects the items to display based on criteria of relevance and quality. Just because you markup 100 recipes, it doesn't mean all 100 will appear — but there is no technical ceiling.

What does this absence of limit mean for SEO practitioners?

You no longer need to ration your markup efforts. If your editorial strategy involves grouping several dozen recipes within the same theme, markup all of them. Google will then sort according to its own ranking algorithms.

Be careful, however: the absence of a technical limit does not mean that everything will be displayed. The quality of content, the freshness of pages, the authority of the domain, and relevance to the query remain critical. A list of 80 mediocre recipes will not perform better than a selection of 10 excellent ones.

• No technical limit on the number of items in a recipe ItemList
• No imposed display ceiling for the carousel — it's the selection algorithm that filters
• Exhaustive markup is possible and even recommended if the content is of high quality
• Relevance and quality remain the true criteria for visibility, not the number of marked items
• No need to artificially fragment your recipe collections to meet an imaginary threshold

Is this statement consistent with what we observe on the ground?

Yes and no. Tests indeed show that you can markup as many items as you want without errors in the Search Console. Coverage reports do not flag any issues if you exceed 20, 50, or 100 recipes in an ItemList. In this respect, Google is correct.

However, the actual display in the SERPs remains limited to an average of about ten elements, often fewer on mobile. [To be verified]: It's unclear whether Google applies a scoring algorithm that favors shorter and more targeted lists or if it's simply that queries do not warrant showing more. The statement remains vague on the selection criteria.

What nuances should be added to this claim?

The first nuance: the absence of a technical limit does not mean that your crawl budget is unlimited. If you markup 500 mediocre recipes, Google may crawl all the pages but will not index them all with the same level of priority. Quality signals matter.

The second nuance: carousels displayed in search results are subject to UX constraints. Google will not bombard the user with 80 thumbnails of recipes. Algorithmic filtering is inevitable, even if the technical limit doesn't exist. In other words, marking up 100 recipes does not guarantee 100 appearances in the carousel.

In what cases could this absence of limit work against you?

If you massively markup recipes of uneven quality, you risk diluting the signal. Google may interpret an overly long list as a lack of editorial curation. A site that dumps 200 recipes into a single ItemList without hierarchy or targeting can lose thematic relevance.

Moreover, some highly competitive culinary domains show that sites that intelligently segment their collections — by dish type, season, or difficulty — perform better than those that group everything into a mega-list. [To be verified]: We lack solid comparative data, but field experience suggests that granularity helps.

What should be done practically with this information?

First, audit your existing collections. If you had intentionally limited the number of marked recipes for fear of a technical ceiling, you can lift this constraint. Mark up all relevant recipes in each thematic collection without holding back.

Next, organize your ItemLists by semantic coherence. A list "Summer Fruit Tart Recipes" with 40 well-documented items is better than a list "All Our Recipes" with 300 heterogeneous entries. Google prioritizes contextual relevance, even in the absence of a technical limit.

What mistakes should you absolutely avoid?

Do not markup everything and anything just because it's technically possible. An item of poor quality in your ItemList can drag down the overall perception of your collection. Google evaluates the average quality of items in a list, not just their quantity.

Also, avoid duplicating the same item across multiple lists without strategic reason. If a recipe appears in 5 different collections without a clear editorial logic, you risk diluting the relevance signal of each list. Redundancy should serve the user, not artificially inflate numbers.

How can you verify that your markup is optimal?

Use Google's Rich Results Test to validate each ItemList. Check that all items are recognized correctly and that no warnings signal a structural problem. Then monitor the Search Console: the performance reports will show if your recipes gain visibility after re-markup.

Also, conduct manual monitoring in the SERPs for your target queries. Note how many of your recipes actually appear in the carousel, and for which queries. If you find that a list of 50 recipes never generates more than 5 appearances, the problem lies elsewhere — content quality, lack of backlinks, low domain authority.

• Markup all relevant recipes in a thematic collection, without arbitrary ceilings
• Organize ItemLists by semantic coherence (season, dish type, difficulty, etc.)
• Check the average quality of items before grouping them into a list
• Avoid catch-all lists of 200+ heterogeneous recipes
• Monitor Search Console reports to measure the actual impact of the markup
• Test carousel display manually on strategic queries