FAQ schema after the rich result ended: what to keep and what to cut

For years an agency could point to FAQ markup as a visible win in search. That win is gone. What is left is the part that always mattered: whether the questions on the page are worth answering.

Written by the Colleviate Strategy desk

What did Google actually remove?

It happened in two steps. In August 2023 Google announced that FAQ rich results, the expandable questions that appeared under a search listing, would be shown only for well-known, authoritative government and health websites, and that How-to rich results would be limited to desktop, which Google ended altogether in September 2023. Then, in a deprecation notice added to its FAQ documentation in May 2026, Google said the feature would no longer appear in Google Search from 7 May 2026.

So for an ordinary business site FAQ rich results have rarely appeared since August 2023, and for everyone there are none now. A valid FAQPage block still passes a validator, because it is still valid schema.org markup, but it no longer produces anything you can screenshot.

Does FAQ markup still do anything?

We have found no published evidence that it improves rankings, and none that it improves how often an AI answer names or cites a page. Google has not said it does either. What the markup does is restate, in a machine-readable form, text that is already on the page. That is cheap and harmless, which is the only honest case for keeping it.

We keep it on our own pages for exactly that reason, and we say so here rather than pretend otherwise. Every question in our markup is also visible on the page with the same answer, which is the one rule that has not changed: markup must describe what a visitor can see.

What matters more than the markup

The questions. A good FAQ block is a list of the questions a buyer really asks before they contact you, each answered in the first sentence and expanded in the second. That helps a reader, and a page that states an answer plainly is easier for any system to quote. A weak one is five sales lines phrased as questions, and no markup rescues it. The test is simple: would the page be better with this block if the markup did not exist?

An audit you can run this week

1. Match markup to the page. Every question and answer in the markup must be visible on the page, word for word or very close to it.
2. Cut the decoration. Remove questions nobody asks, such as “Why choose us?”, and answers that are advertising.
3. Stop counting it. If a report from you or your agency lists FAQ rich results as a win after May 2026, ask what it is measuring.
4. Put the effort where it still pays. Organization, Article, Breadcrumb and Product markup still describe things Google documents. See schema markup that earns results and how Organization markup works.
5. Write for the answer, not the feature. How AI answer engines choose their sources explains why a clear, sourced sentence is worth more than a block of code.

Markup that depends on a search feature is a bet on someone else's product roadmap. Content that answers a real question has lasted through every change in that roadmap.