On May 7, 2026, Google removed FAQ rich results from search. There was no announcement blog post. The change appeared in the official FAQPage structured data documentation. The schema.org type itself remained valid.
That gap is the story.
Three Years to a Full Removal
The deprecation completed a restriction cycle that began in April 2023, when Google limited FAQ rich results to most site types. That August, the feature was narrowed further: only government and health publishers retained eligibility. May 7 closed it entirely, with no public explanation from Google. (Source: Search Engine Journal, May 10, 2026; Google Search Central documentation, updated May 2026.)
Google's updated documentation states that "FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search" and separately confirms that FAQPage "remains a valid schema.org type." The markup is still being read. The next milestones: June 2026, when the FAQ report and Rich Results Test are removed from Search Console; August 2026, when Search Console API support is discontinued.
A Search Engine Land analysis, cited in a March 24, 2026 Frase.io overview, found that pages appearing in Google AI Overviews are 3.2x more likely to have FAQ schema than pages that do not appear in AI-generated answers. This is correlation-only; the methodology behind the calculation is not disclosed in the Frase piece. Treat it as a pattern worth testing, not a causal proof. The structural logic holds independently: FAQ markup labels question-and-answer pairs explicitly, in a format that matches how AI platforms extract and package answers for display. Self-contained Q&A blocks are more segmentable than continuous prose.
Removing It After 2023 Was Defensible. Keeping It Out Now Is Not.
Sites that dropped FAQ schema after the 2023 restrictions made a reasonable call at the time. The feature's display value was restricted; the case for ongoing maintenance weakened. The counterargument to restoring it is real: on large sites, retrofitting markup, keeping it current, and auditing coverage requires effort that competes with other priorities.
Whether that effort clears the bar depends on one question: how often do AI Overviews appear on your informational queries? Seer Interactive's 15-month study across 3,119 queries and 42 organizations found brands cited inside AI Overviews achieve 35% higher organic CTR than uncited competitors on the same queries. (Seer Interactive, November 2025.) FAQ schema is one part of a citation signal set, not a standalone fix; test results indicate that pages with thin body content and markup added on top did not move in citation selection. The markup has to describe what the page actually answers.
One action this week
Pull your informational pages that carried FAQ schema before 2023 and check whether the markup was removed. In Search Console, filter for queries where AI Overview impressions are high on those pages. For any page where AI Overviews appear consistently, prioritize restoring the markup, but confirm the Q&A content exists in body text first. Schema that accurately reflects structured page content is the version most likely to match how AI platforms read and cite it.
This article was produced with AI assistance.