--- title: "Google ended FAQ rich results — what it means for SEO in 2026" description: "On May 7, 2026 Google stopped showing FAQ rich results. June kills the report, August retires the API. What this means for SEO — and whether to remove FAQPage." date: 2026-05-07 category: SEO tags: ["SEO", "Schema.org", "FAQ", "Structured Data", "Google", "Rich Results", "JSON-LD", "AI Overviews"] url: https://uper.pl/en/blog/google-ends-faq-rich-results-2026/ --- # Google ended FAQ rich results — deprecation timeline, SEO impact, and what to do with FAQPage schema **On May 7, 2026, Google officially cut support for FAQ rich results.** The expandable Q&A snippets under search results — which once doubled or tripled a result's footprint in the SERP — disappeared from the index. It's the final chapter of a three-year wind-down: in August 2023 Google narrowed visibility to authoritative government and health sites, and now it has finished the job for them too. The announcement reads dry, but the question on most webmasters' minds is one: should I **rip FAQPage out of my code**, or leave it alone? Short answer: leave it. Long answer below. ## What exactly Google announced In the [official FAQPage documentation](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/faqpage), Google added a deprecation note. Key dates: | Date | What happens | |------|---------------| | **May 7, 2026** | FAQ rich results **stop appearing** in Google Search. No exceptions — including for `.gov` and authoritative health sites | | **June 2026** | The "FAQ search appearance" report disappears from **Google Search Console**, and support is removed from the **Rich Results Test** | | **August 2026** | FAQ support is retired from **Search Console API** — time to update reporting scripts | Google's exact wording: *"FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search. We will be dropping the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and support in the Rich results test in June 2026."* The story was first reported by Barry Schwartz at [Search Engine Land](https://searchengineland.com/google-to-no-longer-support-faq-rich-results-476957). For anyone tracking the format, this isn't a surprise — it's been clear for three years that Google was struggling to keep FAQ snippets relevant once AI Overviews started eating the top of the SERP. ## A quick history: how FAQ rich results became victims of their own success The mechanics matter, because the pattern repeats with other rich result types Google has retired. ### 2019–2023: the golden era Google introduced FAQ rich results in late 2018. Over the following years they became **the favorite SEO hack**: drop a few questions and answers into `application/ld+json`, and your result took up more SERP real estate than your competitor's. Some sites cranked out 5–10 questions, each click-to-expand, with extra links inside the answers. The result? **CTR went up, competitor traffic went down**, and SERPs began to look like a wall of expandable accordions where everyone was racing to cram in as many questions as possible. Google noticed two things: first — mass abuse, with FAQ becoming a pure marketing channel and a second CTA. Second — users themselves started ignoring the format because it was everywhere. ### August 2023: the first cut Google [announced on Search Central Blog](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes) that FAQ rich results would only show for **"well-known, authoritative government and health websites."** HowTo rich results were retired entirely. For most commercial sites it was the end — a hit that cost some industries **20–30% of visibility** on informational queries. Many companies left FAQPage in their code "just in case," and as [AI Overviews and AI citation visibility](/en/blog/how-llms-choose-cite-content-aio-guide/) gained importance, that turned out to be the right call. More on that below. ### May 2026: the final shutdown Less than three years later, even government and health sites lose FAQ rich results. Google doesn't state the reason outright, but the context is obvious: **AI Overviews ate the SERP**, and FAQ as a format became redundant in the new layout. Questions that once expanded inside FAQ snippets now flow into the AI Overview block or the "People also ask" section. The format simply duplicated something Google now generates itself. ## SEO impact ### 1. Direct traffic impact — usually zero Because FAQ rich results have only shown for `.gov` and medical authorities since August 2023, **for 95% of sites this change moves nothing in visibility**. Your FAQPage hasn't been triggering expansions in the SERP for years, so retiring them won't take traffic you didn't have. Exception: if you run an official health or government site and had rich results until the last day — check [Search Console](/en/blog/google-search-console/) for May 2026. You may notice a **CTR drop at flat impressions** for those pages. ### 2. The "FAQ search appearance" report disappears from GSC Starting June 2026, you'll no longer see a separate report in GSC. If you built dashboards on **Search Console API** with `searchAppearance=faq` filters, you have until **August 2026** to refactor. For most teams this is a small thing, but some SEO agencies had entire reporting automations hooked into that endpoint. Check every place where FAQ shows up as a reporting dimension and plan a migration — say, to `searchAppearance=ai_overview` or to a generic pages report. ### 3. FAQPage schema **isn't going away** This is where the biggest misunderstanding lives. FAQ rich results = a visual SERP feature. FAQPage schema (JSON-LD) = a way to mark up content as structured data. Google [confirmed officially in 2023](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes) that you **don't need to proactively remove** the markup, and that unused valid schema **doesn't trigger a penalty**. In practice: the schema stays — it just loses one of its possible SERP applications in Google. ## Why you shouldn't remove FAQ schema (despite the deprecation) Google's decision affects **one surface** — the blue links on google.com. That matters, because content today is consumed across many surfaces simultaneously, and most of them **still actively use FAQ schema**. Let's walk through them. ### 1. AI search engines parse FAQ schema heavily **Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews** treat FAQPage as a structural signal: *"here's a question–answer pair ready to cite."* Pages with valid FAQPage schema land in model citations **2–3x more often** than pages without structure — because the model can isolate an answer as a coherent fragment without guessing. The mechanism is straightforward: in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), the engine first fetches documents, then **slices them into chunks** — fragments of 200–500 tokens to inject into a prompt. A `Question`/`acceptedAnswer` pair in JSON-LD is **a ready, normalized chunk** with a built-in title (the question) and body (the answer). The model doesn't have to extract this from raw HTML and guess where one topic ends and the next begins. More on this in [SEO + RAG: how they work together](/en/blog/seo-and-rag/). The practical consequence: for an AI-citation strategy, **FAQPage is probably more important now than it ever was for Google rich results**. This fits the direction described in [SEO in the AI era](/en/blog/seo-in-ai-era/) and [How to write AI-citable content](/en/blog/how-to-write-ai-citable-content/), as well as the [new SEO KPIs based on AI citations](/en/blog/new-seo-kpis-ai-citations/). ### 2. Google AI Overviews — ironically, still parse FAQ Here's the paradox: Google **retired** FAQ rich results in the classic SERP, but its own AI Overviews feature **still actively uses FAQ schema**. Questions and answers in the "People also ask" block and in generative summaries often cite structurally marked pairs from FAQPage. The schema Google deprecates on one surface is simultaneously feeding another surface — the one increasingly dominating the SERP. ### 3. Bing rich results — still rendered Microsoft Bing **still shows FAQ rich results** in its search results, regardless of Google's decision. Different policy, different product team. Scale? Bing holds low-double-digit percent of global search market share (much higher in some countries and among Microsoft 365 enterprise users). For some industries — especially B2B — that's traffic you don't want to leave on the table. On top of that, Bing powers ChatGPT Search (as the backend search engine) and Microsoft Copilot — meaning whatever Bingbot sees gets multiplied across the Microsoft AI ecosystem. ### 4. DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Naver, Baidu — same story DuckDuckGo uses Bing's index (under their long-running partnership) — so it inherits FAQPage parsing from Bingbot. Yandex (Russia, low double-digit market share regionally), Naver (Korea), and Baidu (China) have **their own rich result implementations** where FAQPage often still renders. For international projects, that's a meaningful piece of the puzzle. ### 5. Voice assistants — Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant Every voice assistant has to **pick one answer for a query**. A FAQPage with a clean question–answer pair is much easier for them to consume than raw HTML. It's not a mass traffic channel, but for certain query classes (opening hours, prices, return policies) it remains a meaningful distribution channel. ### 6. LLM training on web crawls Language models train on web crawls — Common Crawl, OpenAI's own crawlers, Anthropic's, Google's. **Structured data is much more valuable to them than raw text**, because it gives an unambiguous title-vs-answer split. A page with FAQ in JSON-LD is much easier for a training model to recognize as an "authoritative source" for a specific question. It's a long-term, less visible form of "SEO" where structure compounds across model generations. ### Practical takeaway **You optimize structure for the parser, not for the renderer.** Whether or not Google expands an accordion in the SERP — AI models, other search engines, voice assistants, and training crawlers all see a `Question`/`acceptedAnswer` pair as a ready-to-cite chunk. The value didn't disappear — it just moved. ### Practical rule of thumb | Situation | What to do with FAQPage schema | |----------|---------------------------| | The page has **real** user questions | Keep it — value for AI Overviews and Perplexity | | The page has **fake**/marketing FAQs ("Why is our company the best?") | **Remove** — Google doesn't cite them anyway, and now they're just dead weight | | FAQ was inserted mechanically by a plugin without thought | Audit question quality — remove the autogenerated junk, keep what's substantive | | `.gov` / health sites that had rich results until May 2026 | Keep — there is a visual loss, but the schema still serves AI | ## A practical checklist for May–August 2026 What concretely to check over the coming months: 1. **May–June 2026** — compare CTR and impressions for pages with FAQPage before and after May 7 in GSC. CTR drop at flat impressions = a deprecation hit. For most sites the delta will be zero. 2. **June 2026** — before the report retires in GSC, **export historical FAQ search appearance data**. Once the report is gone, you can't get those numbers back. 3. **July 2026** — update any dashboards / scripts pulling the `faq` dimension via the [Search Console API](/en/blog/google-search-console/). 4. **August 2026** — verify no automation is crashing once the dimension is removed from the API. Hard deadline: Google retires the endpoint. 5. **Throughout the year** — audit FAQ schema across your site. Remove **fake and marketing** FAQs. Keep the ones with real user questions. The benchmark should be: does the question come from ["People also ask"](/en/blog/featured-snippets/), from Search Console, or from real customer emails? I covered the proper FAQPage implementation (with JSON-LD examples for WordPress, React, and Astro) in a separate post: [FAQ Schema: how to properly implement FAQPage](/en/blog/faq-schema-google/). ## What else Google has cut in recent years The FAQ deprecation fits a broader pattern of **narrowing rich results**: - **2023** — HowTo rich results retired (entirely). - **2023** — FAQ limited to `.gov` / medical. - **2024–2025** — Recipe rich results restricted for smaller sites. - **2026** — full FAQ shutdown. The trend is clear: Google is **consolidating the SERP** around AI Overviews and its own features. Every rich result that could be merged with an AI-generated answer is quietly being retired. From a strategy perspective, then, treat this not as a one-off loss but as a signal: **invest in structure for AI readers, not for visual ornaments in the SERP**. Same theme runs through analyses of [whether AI is killing organic traffic](/en/blog/do-ai-answers-kill-traffic/). ## Summary May 7, 2026 closes a chapter that, for most sites, ended back in August 2023. **FAQ rich results as a visual SERP feature in Google are history.** June and August 2026 are the last technical deadlines — the GSC report retires, then the Search Console API endpoint. What matters most: **FAQPage schema remains very valuable**, but its role has shifted. Today FAQPage is: - a ready-to-cite chunk for **AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Gemini**, and Microsoft Copilot, - still-rendered rich results in **Bing, Yandex, Naver, Baidu**, and DuckDuckGo (via the Bing partnership), - input for **voice assistants** (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant) picking one answer, - a structural signal in training data for the next generations of **LLMs**. The decision whether to keep FAQ on a page should be based on **content quality**, not on rich-result status in Google. If you have fake FAQs added years ago purely for CTR — remove them. If you have real questions you actually answer — keep them, polish them, and treat them as part of an AI-citation and multi-surface distribution strategy. does not require removal of FAQPage markup. Unused valid schema does not trigger a penalty. More importantly — FAQ schema is still actively parsed by AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, and Gemini, so removing it costs you value with no upside.' }, { question: 'What exactly is going away, and when?', answer: 'May 7, 2026 — FAQ rich results stopped appearing in the Google SERP. June 2026 — the "FAQ search appearance" report retires in Google Search Console, and support is removed from the Rich Results Test. August 2026 — the FAQ dimension is removed from the Search Console API.' }, { question: 'Will my Google traffic drop after the FAQ rich results deprecation?', answer: 'For the vast majority of sites — no. Since August 2023, FAQ rich results only showed for authoritative government (.gov) and health sites. If you don\'t belong to those two categories, your FAQPage hasn\'t been triggering SERP expansions for over 2.5 years. Still — check CTR before and after May 7 in GSC. That\'s the most accurate way to verify.' }, { question: 'Does FAQ schema still help in AI Overviews and ChatGPT Search?', answer: 'Yes — significantly. FAQPage gives AI models structurally isolated question–answer pairs that are easier to cite in generative responses. Pages with valid FAQPage schema have higher citation rates in AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT Search compared to pages without structure.' }, { question: 'Why is Google retiring FAQ rich results when they helped sites increase CTR?', answer: 'Google didn\'t state an official reason, but the context is clear: AI Overviews ate the top of the SERP, and FAQ as a format largely duplicated automatically generated AI blocks. On top of that, abuse had been growing for years — fake, marketing FAQs added solely to inflate the result. Google narrowed access to .gov and health sites in 2023, and now closes rich results entirely.' }, { question: 'Can I still save the FAQ search appearance report in Google Search Console?', answer: 'The report will be available until June 2026. Before it disappears, export historical data (CSV / API) — especially if you run year-over-year comparisons. After the report is gone, you won\'t get those numbers back. Dashboards built on the Search Console API with the FAQ dimension need to be updated by August 2026.' } ]} heading="Frequently Asked Questions" id="faq" /> ## Sources 1. **Search Engine Land — Google to no longer support FAQ rich results** [https://searchengineland.com/google-to-no-longer-support-faq-rich-results-476957](https://searchengineland.com/google-to-no-longer-support-faq-rich-results-476957) 2. **Google Search Central — FAQPage structured data documentation** [https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/faqpage](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/faqpage) 3. **Google Search Central Blog — Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results (2023)** [https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes) 4. **Schema.org — FAQPage** [https://schema.org/FAQPage](https://schema.org/FAQPage) 5. **Google Rich Results Test** [https://search.google.com/test/rich-results](https://search.google.com/test/rich-results)