Is it mandatory to have rich snippets for AMP pages?

Question

I recently created AMP pages (Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages) as per the requirements mentioned in AMP Project Documentation. I didn't add any rich snippets as it was non-mandatory (although recommended) as per the documentation (refer to metadata section).

However, after going live, I have received the following errors in the Google Search Console:

Add required structured data to your AMP pages

Google systems have detected that some of your AMP pages are missing structured data that is required for the page to appear in Google Search results with AMP-related features. The following report provides examples of pages with this (and other) errors:

Is it mandatory to have structured data (rich snippets) in the page?

Answer 1

No.

The AMP HTML Specification and AMP-related features offered by Google Search are separate things (in the same way as Schema.org and Google Rich Snippets are separate things). If you want to have a conforming AMP page, it only matters what the linked specification says. As you noted, AMP does not require structured data.

The notice quoted from Google Search Console says that structured data is required for getting AMP-related features in Google Search, not for conforming to the AMP HTML spec. If you don’t provide certain structured data, your page doesn’t get the feature in Google Search; but nothing else happens.

One example are the Top Stories with AMP. If you, for example, don’t provide Schema.org’s image property in your AMP HTML page, your page is not eligible for getting displayed in the Top Stories carousel.