Your shopping cart is empty!
Google officially ends support for FAQ rich results in search
Publication date: 27.07.2026
Should you remove FAQ markup from your pages after Google's decision? No — and that is the main conclusion. Google has officially ended support for FAQ rich results, but there is no reason to panic and strip out structured data.
The timeline: when FAQ snippets really disappeared
This is essentially a documentation update, not a new algorithm. FAQ rich results nearly disappeared from search back in September 2023, when Google limited them to government and health sites. Everyone else lost those snippets almost three years ago; in July 2026 the company simply recorded the ending in its help materials.
What it means for websites in practice:
- there will be no visible traffic drop — most sites lost the snippets long ago;
- removing FAQ schema gives no ranking benefit whatsoever;
- markup helps machines read content — including AI search and assistants;
- it will not generate Search Console errors: support for the feature is closed, but the markup itself stays valid.
What the SERP shows instead of FAQ
The space once taken by expanded questions now belongs to other blocks: AI Overviews, People Also Ask and classic snippets. Google retired HowTo results alongside FAQ back in 2023 — the same logic: fewer separate elements in the SERP, more room for one summarising block.
For a site owner that changes the purpose. FAQ markup used to be added for an extra line in search results; its value now is that it makes the page structure readable for a machine. The page itself still has to answer the questions in its text, not only in code.
Remove or keep: a short table
| Situation on the page | What to do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A Q&A block exists and the markup matches it | keep | works as a signal for algorithms and AI models |
| The block was removed, the markup stayed | delete | the data no longer matches page content |
| Markup exists, the text never had questions | delete | markup for the sake of markup |
| FAQ duplicates the article text word for word | rewrite the questions | no value, and it can read as spam |
Why keep markup when there are no snippets
Structured data is no longer about "stars in the SERP" but about how clearly machines understand your page. A detailed breakdown is on the Neil Patel blog. The author's key point: do not chase individual SERP features, invest in content quality and a clear structure.
The practical side is that question-and-answer is the most machine-friendly format there is: a short question with a complete answer right next to it. Those fragments are the easiest to quote in AI answers, and that is a different optimisation logic from fighting for a snippet — covered in detail in the article on SGE and AI Overview.
A checklist for auditing your FAQ markup
- go through pages with FAQPage and verify that every question in the schema exists in the visible text;
- remove markup where the Q&A block was deleted during a redesign;
- rewrite one-sentence answers — there is nothing for a machine to take from them;
- do not add FAQ blocks artificially just to have the schema: without real questions it is dead weight.
The one real reason to remove FAQ markup is orphaned code: the Q&A block is gone from the page, but the schema is still sitting in the HTML. In every other case it keeps doing its job for algorithms and AI models, even without a single star in the search results.
