FAQ rich results ended in May 2026. What to do with the markup

Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026. It had announced the change a year earlier, on 8 May 2025, and it finished the job in January 2026 by removing FAQ from Search Console reporting, the Rich Results Test and the search appearance filters. HowTo went earlier and more quietly, on 14 September 2023. Neither type appears in Google's current list of rich result features.

So the question is no longer whether to add FAQ markup. It is what to do with the markup already sitting on the pages, and the answer that circulates is split roughly evenly between rip it out and leave it alone. Google's documentation answers both halves.

The timeline, with dates

Google's position is that structured data which is not used causes no problem for Search, and also has no visible effect in Search. That rules out the panicked answer. There is no penalty, no warning and nothing to clean up for Google's sake, so a site with FAQ markup on two hundred pages is not carrying a defect.

It does not rule out removing it, because Google is not the only reader. FAQPage is still a valid Schema.org type, other engines parse it, and language models ingest whatever is in the page. Keeping it costs a small amount of markup; removing it costs a deploy. Neither is urgent, which is the honest answer and the reason so much of what is written about this reads as more decisive than the facts allow.

What did change is the reason for writing FAQs at all. When the markup bought a visible SERP feature, an FAQ block had a measurable job. Now the value is in the answer itself being present, structured and quotable on the page, which is a content decision rather than a markup one. A question with a self-contained answer under it is exactly the shape an AI engine can lift, which is the mechanism we set out in how AI search engines decide what to cite.

What still earns a rich result

Google's search gallery currently lists twenty-five features. The ones most marketing and service sites can actually use are a short list: Article, Breadcrumb, Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Review snippet, Event, JobPosting, Video, ProfilePage and Dataset. FAQPage and HowTo are not among them. Anything outside that gallery is markup you are writing for readers other than Google Search, which is a legitimate reason but a different one.

Google retired seven more types in June 2025 as well: Book Actions, Course Info, Claim Review, Estimated Salary, Learning Video, Special Announcement and Vehicle Listing. If a site had schema written for any of those, the same reasoning applies. It is dead weight rather than a defect, and it can go the next time the template is touched.

What we decided for this site

This site emits FAQPage on fifteen industry pages, six migration pages and the homepage, in three languages each. We are keeping it, for two reasons that are worth stating rather than assuming. It is generated from the same data that renders the visible FAQ, so it costs nothing to maintain and cannot drift out of sync with what a reader sees. And Google's own guidance is that unused structured data is harmless, so removing it would be work done for a benefit nobody has demonstrated.

The decision would go the other way if the markup were hand-written, duplicated from the visible copy, or describing questions that are not on the page. In that case it is a maintenance liability that no longer buys anything, and the next template change is a good moment to delete it.