May 12, 2026
Author: Jason Faber
This week, Google officially deprecated FAQ rich results. As of May 7, FAQ rich results are gone from search. Google Search Console reporting ends in June and API support wraps up in August.
Way back in my early in my agency days, around 2012, we actively discouraged clients from using FAQs on their pages. The thinking was simple — if your content is well-written and thorough, it already answers your audience's questions. A FAQ section is just a crutch for content that isn't pulling its weight. It was considered to be poor UX and lazy content.
Fast forward a few years and FAQs took off.
By the time Google introduced FAQ schema support in 2019, the entire industry had done a 180. FAQs weren't just acceptable, they were additive. And the rich result was genuinely powerful. You could earn expanded SERP real estate with clickable links directly in the search result. Lily Ray documented the opportunity well in a 2019 Moz post, and SEO teams everywhere were seeing meaningful impressions and click gains from it.
The SEO industry has a reliable cycle: Google begins rewarding a specific tactic, practitioners use it well, practitioners overuse it, practitioners abuse it, Google takes it away. We've seen it with exact-match domains, keyword stuffing, link schemes, and now FAQ schema.
By 2023, Google had already started pulling back, limiting FAQ rich results to "well-known, authoritative government and health websites." Most sites lost eligibility then. This week's update just finished the job, removing it for those remaining sites too. The final blow.
What's particularly interesting about the timing is the theory Lily Ray floated on LinkedIn: a flood of new GEO content (reportedly 168,000+ articles) had been circulating the claim that "FAQ schema is critical for GEO." The same playbook, just a new acronym. Google may have seen the writing on the wall and decided to cut it off before the next wave of spam arrived.
Google hasn't confirmed that. But we've lived through this pattern enough times to recognize it.
We've been prioritizing FAQ content and FAQ Schema for so long now – was it all a waste? Should we keep doing it? Will this hurt us now?
Whenever something like this happens, clients naturally spin out a bit. I get it – it feels like a lot of thrash. I've been working in SEO long enough to know that this is just how it goes. So here are my thoughts (as of May 12, 2026) on how we should approach things moving forward with FAQ content.
No. If your FAQs are well-written and genuinely useful to visitors, keep them. The content itself isn't the problem — it was the overuse of schema as a hack that caused Google to pull back.
There's no urgency here. Google has confirmed that unused structured data doesn't create problems for search. FAQPage is still a valid Schema.org type. It won't slow your site down, and it won't hurt your search visibility. In fact, FAQ schema might (maybe just maybe) be helpful for AEO and LLM visibility.
Yes — but only when they genuinely improve the page for a real reader (your ICP, not the crawlers). That's how this always should have been approached, by the way. The mistake wasn't using FAQs; it was using them because you thought it was a nifty SEO/AEO/GEO hack rather than because your users actually needed them.
This is a big old bag of "it depends". We know that it won't hurt you (Google wise.) We also know that structured data is generally a good thing, as it can help crawlers of all types better understand the structure of your various content types.
The more relevant question is: how is your schema generated?
If you have an automated process that produces FAQ schema whenever you create FAQ content, just let it run. There's no reason to break that workflow.
If your FAQ schema requires someone to physically write the JSON-LD file and manual developer time to implement it into your CMS, that calculus has changed. It's harder to justify those resources now that Google has removed the rich result benefit.
Would that time and resources be better spent elsewhere?
This is where it gets genuinely uncertain. A meaningful chunk of the SEO community believes structured data (including FAQ schema) helps large language models better understand and surface your content. Structured markup helps AI systems understand and select your content.
There are studies pointing in that direction. In fact, AirOps research found pages with clear headings and schema earn 2.8× more AI citations than poorly structured pages.
But the contrarians will say that it's not the schema driving this, but the quality and relevance of the content (and other SEO fundamentals being nailed). Basically, you can't schema your way to a citation.
Chris Long of Nectiv recently shared a report that found that schema had virtually zero impact on LLM visibility.
At this time, no one can say definitively that FAQ schema drives LLM citations.
What we can say: high-quality, well-structured content that helps any crawler understand what you're about is a good thing. If your FAQs serve that goal, they're doing their job — with or without a rich result attached.
Every few years, a tactic moves from "smart use" to "table stakes" to "everyone's doing it to game the system." FAQ schema followed that arc to the letter.
The version of me from 2012 wasn't entirely wrong. Content that anticipates and addresses your audience's questions, woven naturally into the page, not bolted on as an afterthought, has always been the right approach. FAQs are a format, not a strategy. When they serve the reader, use them. When they're there to chase a SERP feature, you're playing the wrong game.
I, for one, will continue to prioritize FAQ content with most of my clients. My approach has, and always will be, to create unique, insightful and valuable content that genuinely helps a user.
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