What Is FAQ Schema Markup?
The type whose visible benefit has gone entirely. A great deal of published advice still describes the expanded FAQ appearance as something you can obtain, which is worth correcting before anybody sells you work on that basis.
What It Asserts
A set of questions and the answers given to them, as shown on the page. Both halves have to be visible to a person. Marking up questions that are not on the page is the usual misuse of this type.
What each question claims. That it appears here.
Not that somebody asked it, nor that it is popular. The claim is that this page displays this question with this answer, which a reader can confirm by scrolling.
Why both halves matter. Answers get omitted.
Marking up a question whose answer sits elsewhere, else is only partly given, breaks the description. The answer asserted should be the answer shown, in full.
What it does not claim. Anything about frequency.
The name suggests these are frequently asked. Nothing in the markup states that, which is fortunate, since most published question sections were written by somebody guessing.
Why this type is unusually easy to abuse. Questions are cheap.
Anybody can invent a question. That is why this type acquired a reputation. It is part of why the visible benefit was eventually withdrawn.
The Visible Benefit Has Gone
The expanded FAQ appearance no longer exists for any site. That is a stronger statement than most published guidance makes. It is the current position rather than the earlier one.
The first change. August 2023.
Google announced on its Search Central blog that FAQ rich results would only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For every other site the appearance stopped, which is the restriction most guidance still describes.
The second change. May 2026.
The feature ceased appearing entirely, including for the government and health sites that had remained eligible. Google's FAQ structured data documentation now carries a notice stating that FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Search.
What is being removed and when. Three stages.
That same notice states the FAQ search appearance, the rich result report and support in the Rich Results Test are dropped in June 2026, with Search Console API support removed in August 2026.
Why the distinction matters to you. Older advice is wrong.
Guidance repeating the government and health restriction as the current rule is describing a policy that has been superseded. Anybody proposing work to obtain this appearance is proposing something impossible.
Whether to remove existing markup. No need.
Google has said unused structured data does not cause problems for Search. The type also remains valid in the vocabulary. This page is reviewed quarterly by Andrew Odgers, Managing Director, because it has already changed twice.
So Why Still Use It
The reason is accuracy rather than reward. Describing question content correctly is worth doing because it is true. Anything expecting a benefit needs treating carefully.
What it still does. Describes the page.
A page containing genuine questions and answers is accurately described by markup saying so. That holds whether or not any particular system acts on it, which is the durable version of the argument.
Who reads structured data. More than one search engine.
Other search engines, aggregators and assistants all read structured descriptions. None of them promises anything in return. Describing your page correctly is a reasonable thing to do regardless.
What we will not claim. An advantage in AI answers.
A great deal of recent advice presents this type as a route into AI-generated answers. Google's own guidance on its AI features states that no special structured data is needed for them, so we do not make that claim.
What that guidance does say. Match the page.
It adds that any structured data you do use should correspond to visible page content. That is the same rule this whole section runs on, arriving from a different direction.
The practical position. Keep it where it is true.
Genuine questions, genuinely answered on the page, described accurately. Not added anywhere new in pursuit of something that no longer exists.
It Must Be Real FAQ Content
Questions invented to carry terms, else answers that do not appear on the page, are false assertions. They are also obvious, which makes them a poor trade even setting the accuracy question aside.
The invented question. Written backwards.
A question composed so that the answer can contain particular words. Nobody asks it in that form. The phrasing gives it away to any reader.
The absent answer. Markup without content.
An answer stated in the description and not shown on the page. That describes a page that does not exist, which is the same error as asserting a rating with no reviews.
Why they are obvious. The register is wrong.
Genuine questions sound like something a customer said. Manufactured ones sound like a heading rewritten with a question mark. Readers notice the difference even without articulating it.
What genuine questions look like. Awkward.
Real customer questions are frequently badly phrased, oddly specific or slightly hostile. Those are the useful ones. Smoothing them into marketing language removes what made them real.
Where to get them. Your own inbox.
The questions people actually ask arrive by phone and email daily. That source is better than any research and costs nothing to collect.
Do Not Turn Every Page Into A FAQ
Bolting questions onto pages to use the markup produces worse pages. The content should exist because readers ask those things. The description should follow the content rather than driving it.
What the bolted-on version looks like. A section nobody needed.
Three or four questions appended to a page that already answered them, rewritten as questions to justify the addition. The page is now longer and says the same thing twice.
Why it happened so widely. The appearance was worth chasing.
While the expanded result existed, adding questions bought visible space. That incentive produced enormous quantities of manufactured question sections, which is a large part of why the feature was withdrawn.
What that leaves behind. Pages padded for nothing.
A great many sites now carry question sections added purely for an appearance that no longer happens. Those sections are worth reviewing on their merits as content.
What to do with them. Judge them as writing.
Where the questions are genuine and useful, keep them. Where they were padding, removing them improves the page. The markup goes with them.
The general rule. Content first, description second.
Every time that order gets reversed in this subject, the result is a worse page carrying an accurate description of its own padding.
Our Own Standard
Every informational page we build carries a genuine questions section and describes it, including this one. The withdrawal of the appearance has not changed that. It is worth saying why.
Where our questions come from. What people actually ask.
Client calls, enquiry emails and the things that come up repeatedly in meetings. Not invented to carry terms, which is why several of them are awkwardly phrased.
Why we still describe them. Because it is accurate.
The section exists, the answers are visible and the markup says so. That was true before the appearance was withdrawn and remains true afterwards, since the description never depended on the reward.
What we are not claiming. That it gains you anything.
We are not telling clients this produces an appearance, because it does not. Anybody still selling FAQ markup on that basis is selling something that stopped existing.
Why we have not removed it. Two reasons.
Unused structured data causes no problem. The questions sections themselves were always written to be useful rather than to obtain a result. There is nothing to undo.
The test we applied to ourselves. Would we keep the content.
If the questions would stay on the page with no markup at all, the markup is describing something real. On our guides they would, which is the only defence that matters.
Keeping Answers Current
A marked-up answer that has gone out of date is a stale assertion. Question sections need the same review discipline as the rest of the page. They tend not to get it.
Why they go stale quietly. Nobody rereads them.
Question sections sit at the foot of a page and get skipped during reviews. An answer written years ago can contradict the page above it without anybody noticing.
What tends to age. Anything specific.
Answers naming a process, a timescale, a requirement or a way of doing something. The general explanations survive and the concrete details do not.
Why the markup makes it worse. It is asserted.
An out-of-date paragraph is merely wrong. The same paragraph described as an answer is being stated as fact, which is the position this section takes throughout.
What a review involves. Reading them as answers.
Asking of each question whether the answer is still what you would say. That is a short task and it never happens without somebody being responsible for it.
Where the questions belong in a review. With the page.
Treat them as part of the content rather than as an appendix. Article markup covers the related point about revision dates meaning something.
That appearance
no longer
exists.
Anybody proposing work to obtain an expanded FAQ result is proposing something impossible. A great deal of published advice still describes the older restriction as though it were current. We will tell you when a thing you have been sold has stopped existing.
On every page we build:
This page is reviewed quarterly. The position has already changed twice.
Every guide.
One practice.
What structured data is, which types apply to your business, how to test it, where the results features come from and what to do when nothing appears.
