FAQ rich results were switched off in May

FAQ rich results no longer appear in Google Search. The deprecation completed globally on 7 May 2026, and it removed the last exempt categories, government and health sites, which had kept the feature since the 2023 rollback. The Search Console reporting for it was removed by June.

The markup itself is still valid. Google still parses FAQPage. It just does not draw anything on the results page any more.

If you have a content team producing FAQ blocks specifically for that expanded listing, the reason for that work ended in May.

What actually happened, in sequence

August 2023: Google limited FAQ rich results to what it called well-known authoritative government and health websites. Overnight, most commercial sites lost the expanded accordion under their listing. HowTo rich results were removed at the same time for desktop and then entirely.

May 2026: the remaining exemption was removed. FAQ rich results are now off across the board.

June 2026: the FAQ enhancement report disappeared from Search Console, which is the practical signal that this is not a temporary test.

The stated reasoning across both rounds has been consistent. The feature cluttered results and was heavily gamed. Once every page carried a fifteen-question accordion written to occupy vertical space, the feature stopped helping searchers and started degrading the page.

What this does not mean

Three overcorrections to avoid.

It does not mean strip FAQPage markup from your site. It is still valid. It costs nothing to leave in place. Google still parses it, and other systems read it too. Ripping it out is a sprint of engineering time with no upside.

It does not mean stop answering questions. The questions your buyers ask are still the queries they type. What ended is a specific visual treatment on the results page, not the value of having the answer.

It does not mean question content is dead for AI features. Google's own optimisation guide says structured data is not required for generative AI search. FAQ markup was never the reason you got quoted, so losing the rich result does not change your AI citation position either way.

What it does mean for your pages

The FAQ block became a bad habit at a lot of companies. It was a place to dump keyword variations, a way to add word count without adding content, and a template component that shipped on every page whether or not anyone had a question about that page.

With the display incentive gone, the honest question is whether each block earns its place for the reader. Usually it does not in its current form.

Three fixes worth making:

Move the real answers into the body. If a question matters enough that buyers ask it, the answer belongs in the main content where it will be read, not folded into an accordion at the bottom where roughly nobody expands it. Retrieval also works better on visible body text than on collapsed content in some implementations.

Delete the padding. Any question you invented to hold a keyword should go. You will usually find a third to a half of the block falls into this category.

Keep the genuine service FAQ. Pricing, lead times, warranty, service area, what happens if something goes wrong. Those are real questions and they convert. They just do not need to be in an accordion pretending to be a search feature.

The bigger pattern this is part of

FAQ is the fifth or sixth rich result type retired in three years. HowTo went. Q&A coverage narrowed. The list of markup types that render something in Google is short and getting shorter: product with price and availability, review snippets, breadcrumbs, video, events, recipes, job postings, and a handful of others.

That has a strategic consequence most SEO scopes have not caught up with. Structured data used to be a display tactic. You added markup, you got a bigger listing, you got more clicks. That trade is mostly over.

What structured data is now good for is stating facts about your business in a machine-readable form: Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, sameAs. Not to win a snippet, but to make your entity unambiguous to every system that reads the web. That is a slower, quieter benefit and it is much harder to put on a monthly report, which is exactly why it gets dropped from scopes that need visible wins.

What to check this week

1. 1.Find every template with an FAQ component. Count how many questions across the site are genuine and how many were manufactured. In most enterprise sites the answer is uncomfortable.
2. 2.Check whether your FAQ content is in the DOM on load. If it renders only on click through JavaScript, some retrieval paths never see it. That was already true before May, but the FAQ block was often carrying content that lives nowhere else on the page.
3. 3.Pull the traffic history for pages that had rich results in 2023. If nobody ever measured the loss from the first deprecation, you now have three years of hindsight available in one afternoon.
4. 4.Fix your reporting deck. If a slide still shows FAQ rich result coverage, it is now measuring nothing.

The honest bit

Losing FAQ rich results costs most companies very little. The feature had already been off for commercial sites since 2023, so unless you run a health or government domain, your listing did not change in May. What changed is the last justification for a content pattern that was mostly written for a machine.

Content built for a display feature dies with the display feature. Content built for a buyer does not.