Google Dropped FAQ Rich Results, Not FAQ Schema

If your FAQ dropdowns vanished from Google over the past few weeks, you saw it correctly. On May 7, Google removed FAQ rich results from search, the expandable question-and-answer panels that ran under listings and grabbed a few extra lines of space. It happened with no blog post and no fanfare, only a note added to a developer doc. Half the industry immediately declared FAQ schema dead. The other half decided it was now a secret weapon for AI search. Both are wrong, and the gap between them is where the useful read lives.

The display feature died, not the markup

The confusion comes from two things sharing one name. FAQ rich results were a display feature, the visible Q&A accordion on the results page. FAQPage schema is the markup underneath, a bit of code that tells search engines a section of your page is structured as questions and answers. Google retired the first. The second is untouched and still a valid Schema.org type.

The removal runs on a schedule. The rich results stopped showing on May 7. In June, Google drops the FAQ report in Search Console and pulls FAQ support from the Rich Results Test. In August, the Search Console API stops returning FAQ data, so any dashboard or export pulling those numbers goes quiet after that. And this time it reaches everyone. Back in 2023, Google had already cut FAQ rich results down to a small set of government and health sites. May’s change removes that last exception, so no category still qualifies.

None of this should read as a shock, because Google has been doing it for years. HowTo rich results came off desktop in 2023. Last year Google pulled seven more structured data types out of search appearance in one go. The company keeps trimming visual features that got scaled by SEO tools and stopped reliably describing the page. The markup spec survives each time, and the display feature doesn’t.

The two overreactions to skip

Start with the crowd ripping FAQ schema out of their templates. There’s no reason to. Google has said plainly that unused structured data causes no problems for search, and FAQPage is still valid markup. Pulling it out is busywork, and if the schema accurately describes real questions and answers on the page, removing it only strips out context a machine could have used. Leave it where it’s honest.

Now the other crowd, the one relabeling FAQ schema as an AI Overviews cheat code. That overstates it. Google’s own AI guidance is explicit that no special schema is required to show up in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that any structured data you use should match the visible text. AI systems pull from clean question-and-answer content whether the markup is present or not. The evidence that the schema itself earns you citations is thin and mixed. What is confirmed is smaller and comes from elsewhere. Microsoft has said schema helps its Copilot models understand content, and other crawlers like Bing’s and Perplexity’s do read structured data. So keeping clean markup is a reasonable low-cost bet across those surfaces. Calling it a Google AI lever is not.

The schema was never the work

Step back and the deprecation clarifies something the SEO world blurred for years. The schema was never doing the work; the content was. FAQ markup told Google how to draw an accordion. It never made your answers correct, useful, or the ones an AI system would choose to quote. Those come from the writing itself, from actually answering the questions people ask about your topic, in plain, self-contained chunks a reader or a model can lift cleanly.

So the move this week is boring and correct. Keep the FAQ sections that actually help someone, and make the answers strong in the visible text, not buried in markup. Drop FAQ blocks you only ever added to game the accordion, along with any schema pointing at content that no longer exists. And before June, export your FAQ rich result report from Search Console with the last quarter of click data, so you have a baseline if you ever want to measure what the removal cost you.

What outlasts a display widget

The bigger lesson runs past this one feature. Chasing a display widget was always a fragile way to earn visibility, because Google gives those out and takes them back on its own schedule. What it doesn’t hand out or claw back is the standing you build by being useful and by being cited. Strong content answers the questions people actually have. Earned coverage and links from credible sites tell Google and its AI systems you’re a source to trust. Those survive every deprecation notice, because no one can switch them off from a developer doc.