Google Removed FAQ Rich Results. Should You Still Ship FAQPage Markup?

Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search on 7 May 2026 and deleted the FAQPage documentation on 15 June 2026. If you added FAQPage markup to win the dropdown under your listing, that reason is gone, and it has been gone for most sites since 2023. Keep the markup if it describes a real FAQ on the page. Do not keep it expecting a search feature.

This is not a hypothetical for us. Every one of the 170 posts on this blog emits FAQPage markup, 902 question and answer pairs in total, and we checked what that is worth before deciding to leave it in place. Here is what Google actually changed, what we found on our own pages, and how to make the call for yours.

What did Google change, and when?

Three changes over three years, each documented by Google itself.

On 8 August 2023, in a Search Central post titled "Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results", Google wrote: "Going forward, FAQ (from FAQPage structured data) rich results will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown regularly." On 14 September 2023 the FAQ structured data documentation was updated to say the same.

On 8 May 2026, Google's documentation changelog added an entry headed "Deprecating the FAQ rich result feature", explaining: "This feature will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026."

On 15 June 2026, a further entry headed "Removing documentation for the FAQ rich result feature" recorded that the documentation was gone. Google's stated reason: "The FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results, as announced in the changelog entry in May 2026."

Note the order. For most sites the feature effectively ended in 2023. The 2026 entries ended it for the government and health sites that still had it, and then removed the reference material.

Where does the old documentation URL go now?

It redirects to the removal note. Request developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/faqpage and you land on developers.google.com/search/updates#removing-faq-rich-result, the changelog anchor for the June 2026 entry. We checked this on 29 October 2026.

That redirect is worth knowing about because of what it does to your sources. Any guide, checklist or internal wiki page that links to the old FAQPage reference now points a reader at a notice saying the feature is gone.

Audit tooling has the same lag, including ours. The admin tooling behind this site still exposes a "missing FAQ schema" check, and it still reports a clean result as though a clean result were worth something. That check is enforcing a rule whose documentation Google deleted in June, and it is on our list to retire.

What is on our own pages?

All 170 published posts carry a structured FAQ, and the CMS turns that field into FAQPage JSON-LD. Counting every entry in that field across the corpus, fetched from the growthhasten.com CMS API on 29 October 2026, gives 902 question and answer pairs, each of which becomes one Question entity in the markup.

We verified one page end to end on the same day rather than trusting the template. Fetching /blog/audit-false-positives as served returns a FAQPage block with four Question entities, and the answer text in that block also appears in the rendered HTML of the page, not only in the script tag. That second part still matters. Google's structured data general guidelines, which are very much still live, say "Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page", so markup describing content a visitor cannot see remains a guidelines problem rather than a shortcut.

So our markup describes something real. It also earns us no search feature, and it will not start to.

Does FAQPage markup still do anything?

Two things are true at once, and they belong in different categories of confidence.

Documented: Google says unused structured data is harmless, and says so twice in consecutive sentences of the same 2023 post. "While you can drop this structured data from your site, there's no need to proactively remove it. Structured data that's not being used does not cause problems for Search, but also has no visible effects in Google Search." That is Google telling you the cost of leaving it is zero and the search benefit is also zero.

Inference, not evidence: explicit question and answer pairs give any system parsing your page an unambiguous mapping from a question to its answer, which is easier to consume than inferring the same structure from headings and paragraphs. That is a reasonable thing to believe about retrieval systems. It is not a measured result, no credible study has shown FAQPage markup causing citations in AI engines, and vendors who tell you schema drives AI citations are selling you a claim nobody has tested. We treat it the same way elsewhere in our structured data guide: schema is plumbing, not persuasion.

Should you remove FAQPage markup from your site?

In most cases, no. Removing it is work with no payoff, and Google has explicitly said there is no need to. The decision splits by what the markup is actually describing.

Your situation	Do this
Your CMS generates FAQPage from a real, visible FAQ field	Leave it. It is accurate, free, and your template already maintains it.
You hand-wrote FAQPage JSON-LD for questions that are not on the page	Remove it. This was a guidelines problem before the deprecation and still is.
You are adding FAQs to pages purely to carry schema	Stop. The feature that justified it no longer exists, and the FAQs are now page weight with no job.
You are building a new template today	Spend the effort on Article, Organization and BreadcrumbList instead. Add FAQPage only where a genuine FAQ exists.

The one thing not to do is keep a line in your technical SEO checklist that reads "add FAQ schema for rich results". Google announced the restriction on 8 August 2023 and said it would finish rolling out "within the next week", so that sentence has been wrong for most sites since mid-August 2023, and wrong for everyone since May 2026.

What should the FAQ section itself do now?

Answer the question in under 60 words, in plain text the reader can see, because the value has moved from the markup to the words. A short, direct, self-contained answer is useful to a reader skimming, quotable by anything retrieving passages, and eligible to be lifted as a featured snippet, which is a search feature that still exists.

We are not fully compliant with our own standard here. In the same 29 October 2026 pull, the median structured FAQ answer across these 170 posts came to 69 words, and 753 of the 902 answers run longer than 60. That is a real gap, it is on our list, and it is more worth fixing than anything in the JSON-LD.

How do you check your own pages?

Four checks, all free, none of which require an SEO platform.

1. Fetch the page as served rather than opening it in a browser tab, so you see what a crawler sees. curl the URL and search the response for FAQPage.
2. Confirm the answers are in the visible HTML too, not only in the script tag. Take the first 40 characters of an answer from the JSON-LD and look for them in the page body.
3. Validate the syntax with the Schema Markup Validator at validator.schema.org, which checks your markup against the Schema.org vocabulary rather than against the list of features Google chooses to display.
4. Grep your own documentation for "FAQ rich result" and "FAQ schema" and fix any sentence that promises a search appearance.

If all four pass, you are done. There is nothing further to win here, and the hours are better spent on the parts of a technical SEO checklist that still change what Google shows.

Why does a dead tactic survive this long?

Because nothing tells you when a justification expires. Google announced support for FAQ structured data on 8 May 2019 in a post titled "New in structured data: FAQ and How-to", and the feature stopped appearing in Search on 7 May 2026, almost exactly seven years later. In between it entered every checklist, and it survived a 2023 announcement that quietly removed it from almost every site, because a checklist item has no expiry date and nobody re-reads the documentation behind a line that has been there for years. People are still asking about it: "faq schema" carries roughly 1,500 United States searches a month at a keyword difficulty of 54, according to Ahrefs on 29 October 2026.

The general version of the lesson: when a tactic is justified by a search feature, check whether the feature still exists before you build for it. Google documents these removals in its own changelog, and that changelog is a better source than any article about it, including this one.