Google removed FAQ rich results from search entirely on May 7, 2026, after a three-year phase-out that started by restricting the feature to government and well-known health sites, so FAQPage schema no longer earns the expandable question-and-answer snippet it used to show under a result. That doesn’t make the schema worthless: it still helps AI systems and some non-Google surfaces parse question-and-answer content, which is a different job than winning a rich result. This checklist walks through what to check on your own site before you decide to keep, rewrite, or delete FAQ markup.
What Actually Changed, and When
Google’s own structured-data documentation now records two changelog entries rather than a feature guide: “Deprecating the FAQ rich result feature,” dated May 8, 2026, which states the feature stopped appearing in Search starting May 7, 2026; and “Removing documentation for the FAQ rich result feature,” dated June 15, 2026, which confirms the removal and points back to the May entry. Structured data, for anyone new to the term, is markup added to a page’s HTML — usually as JSON-LD — that describes its content in a machine-readable format so search engines and other crawlers can parse it without guessing from the visible text. FAQPage was one schema type among many; this change affects only its Search rich-result eligibility, not the schema type’s validity or its usefulness to non-Google consumers.
The May 2026 removal was the last step in a longer narrowing, not a sudden decision. Google first cut back FAQ rich results in August 2023, announcing in its Search Central blog post “Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results” that the feature would “only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites” going forward, with other sites’ FAQ markup no longer shown regularly even though it remained technically valid. That 2023 change already should have told most sites the feature wasn’t coming back for them specifically — the 2026 removal just formalized that it wasn’t coming back for anyone.
The Checklist: What to Check Before You Touch Anything
Work through these in order — each one changes what the right action is for the next.
- 1. Confirm you’re actually losing something, not imagining a loss. Check Google Search Console’s Performance report, filtered to pages with FAQPage markup, for a CTR drop starting around May 2026. If the pages were never landing the rich result in your market or against your competitors to begin with, there’s nothing to recover — go straight to the “should I remove it” step below.
- 2. Check whether Rank Math (or whichever plugin added the schema) is still outputting valid FAQPage JSON-LD. A documentation removal doesn’t break existing markup, but plugin updates following a feature deprecation sometimes do; paste the page’s source into Google’s Rich Results Test to confirm the JSON-LD still validates as schema, even though it won’t report rich-result eligibility anymore.
- 3. Decide whether the content under that markup still earns its place on the page without the snippet incentive. A lot of FAQ sections were written specifically to win the rich result — short, generic Q&As bolted onto the bottom of a page. If that’s what you have, this is the moment to either rewrite those into real, specific answers or cut them, rather than leaving dead weight that no longer does the job it was built for.
- 4. Check whether AI-driven traffic justifies keeping the markup anyway. FAQPage schema’s structured question-and-answer format is still a fairly clean target for an AI system extracting a direct answer, even without a Google rich result attached to it. If your analytics show meaningful referral or citation traffic from AI assistants, keeping well-written FAQ schema is a reasonable bet on that channel rather than on Google’s rich results. If you don’t have referral data broken out by AI assistant yet, checking server logs for known AI crawler user agents over the last month is a reasonable proxy for whether anything is actually reading these pages.
- 5. Look at what your actual competitors are doing, not what SEO blogs assume. Pull up the pages currently ranking above yours for the same queries and check whether they still carry FAQPage markup, and whether their FAQ sections read as genuinely useful or as leftover snippet bait. If the sites outranking you have already stripped or rewritten theirs, that’s a more reliable signal than any general advice about the feature.
- 6. Don’t let this become an excuse to pad pages with generic FAQs again. Whatever you decide about the markup, our piece on AI-assisted content getting stuck as “discovered, currently not indexed” covers why thin, templated Q&A sections are a bigger liability than losing one rich-result type — Google’s broader helpful-content signals don’t care whether the thin content is in an FAQ block or a paragraph.
Before and After: Rewriting a Snippet-Bait FAQ Block
Here’s the kind of FAQ block that was common when the rich result was still worth chasing, next to a version written for the content itself rather than for the snippet it no longer earns.
Before: “Q: What is project management software? A: Project management software is a tool that helps teams manage projects. Q: Why use project management software? A: It helps you stay organized and meet deadlines.” Both questions are generic enough to apply to almost any product in the category, and neither answer gives a reader information they couldn’t get from the page’s own headline.
After: “Q: What happens to existing tasks if I downgrade from the Team plan to Solo? A: Tasks already assigned to other people become read-only for you, but they aren’t deleted — the account owner can reassign them or export them as CSV before the downgrade takes effect.” The rewritten version answers something a real user would search for because they’re specifically stuck on it, and it does so with a fact (read-only status, CSV export) that couldn’t be guessed from the rest of the page. That specificity is what makes the block worth keeping now that it earns nothing visually in Google’s results — it has to justify its space the same way any other paragraph on the page does.
What This Doesn’t Change
FAQPage schema is still valid schema.org vocabulary, and nothing about Google’s removal makes it incorrect to use — Google simply stopped rendering it as a visual rich result in Search. If you maintain other schema types on the same pages, this change is isolated to FAQPage specifically; it has no bearing on whether your Article schema or your HowTo schema continues to qualify for rich results, since those are evaluated independently under their own eligibility rules.
A Pattern Worth Watching For Going Forward
This is the second rich-result feature to go through a multi-year narrowing before full removal that this site has covered — HowTo rich results went through the same shape of retirement, starting with the identical August 2023 announcement, which restricted HowTo results to desktop only and dropped them from mobile Search entirely. Lay the two timelines side by side and the pattern is consistent enough to plan around: a feature first gets restricted to a narrow set of sites or surfaces, then quietly stops rendering broadly for everyone else, then the documentation itself disappears months to years later, usually with far less announcement fanfare than the original launch got. If you’re relying on a specific rich-result type as a traffic strategy, treat Search Console’s own feature-eligibility reports as a leading indicator rather than waiting for an official announcement, since Google’s deprecations so far have tended to show up in declining impressions for the feature well before the changelog catches up.
If You Decide to Remove the Markup
If the checklist above leads you to remove FAQPage schema rather than keep it, do it through whatever added it in the first place rather than hand-editing JSON-LD in a page template. In Rank Math, FAQ blocks are typically added through the FAQ Gutenberg block or the Schema module’s FAQ type; deleting the block, or switching that page’s schema type to “None” in Rank Math’s schema settings, removes the generated JSON-LD cleanly without leaving orphaned markup that validates against nothing. After removing it, re-run the page through the Rich Results Test to confirm no FAQPage errors remain — a half-removed FAQ block (the markup gone but a stray closing tag or script fragment left behind) is a more common mess than people expect, and it’s worth the thirty seconds to check.
Verify the Current Status Yourself
Google’s own FAQPage structured data documentation carries the two changelog entries referenced above and is the most reliable place to check if this guidance is updated again. Run your own pages through the Rich Results Test to see current eligibility rather than trusting any third-party summary, including this one, since Google’s rich-result policies have changed enough in the last three years that older advice online is no longer accurate. Bookmark the changelog section of that documentation page specifically, since it’s the fastest way to catch the next deprecation before it reaches the general SEO press.
Photo: Convex lens (magnifying glass) and upside-down image by AntanO, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
