FAQPage Schema

What FAQPage schema is, the exact timeline Google used to phase out the FAQ rich result (August 2023 → May 7, 2026), why the FAQPage type is still valid markup, how it differs from QAPage, and whether it's still worth implementing in 2026.

First published: Jul 1, 2026 · Last updated: Jul 17, 2026 · Advanced
demand #15 in Structured Data#43 in On-Page#188 in Technical SEO#248 on the site
1 evidence signal on this page

FAQPage schema (schema.org/FAQPage) marks up a page's frequently-asked-questions content — a mainEntity array of Question items, each with a name and an acceptedAnswer that has text. It used to earn an expandable FAQ rich result in Google Search, but Google restricted that to government and health sites on August 8, 2023, then fully removed it for everyone — including those gov/health sites — on May 7, 2026. Google's own FAQ tooling followed: the search-appearance filter, rich result report, and Rich Results Test support in June 2026, and Search Console API support in August 2026. The crucial distinction: the rich result is gone, but the FAQPage type is not deprecated. It's still valid markup, Google says it still parses it to understand pages, and there's no penalty and no need to rip it out. Bing has announced no equivalent restriction or removal — an absence of an announcement, not independent confirmation it's currently displaying FAQ rich results. Don't confuse FAQPage with QAPage (community Q&A, multiple answers) — QAPage is a different type that's still supported, with a supported-properties update logged March 24, 2026. And the popular 'FAQ schema helps AI citations' claim is unproven — an Ahrefs test cited by SEJ (pooling multiple schema types, not FAQPage alone, across ~1,885 pages) found only a small +2.2% ChatGPT-citation change after adding schema, which the researchers called too small to separate from random variation. My advice: leave existing markup in place, don't chase the old rich result, and judge new FAQ content on its on-page and UX merits.

TL;DR — schema.org/FAQPage markup (mainEntityQuestionacceptedAnswerAnswer.text) once made a page eligible for Google’s expandable FAQ rich result. Google restricted it to authoritative government and health sites on August 8, 2023, then fully removed it for everyone — including those gov/health sites — on May 7, 2026. Google’s own FAQ tooling wound down on a staggered schedule: the FAQ search-appearance filter, rich result report, and Rich Results Test support stopped in June 2026; Search Console API support is scheduled to drop in August 2026 and hadn’t happened as of this update. Critically, the FAQPage type is not deprecated — it’s still valid markup, Google says it keeps parsing it for page understanding, and there’s no penalty for leaving it in. Bing has announced no equivalent restriction or removal — that’s an absence of an announcement, not independent confirmation Bing is actively displaying FAQ rich results today. FAQPage ≠ QAPage (community Q&A, still supported, with a March 24, 2026 supported- properties update). The “FAQ schema boosts AI citations” claim is unproven — the one dataset I could verify found a statistically insignificant change, not a meaningful effect either way. My call: leave existing markup, don’t chase the dead rich result, judge new FAQ content on its own merits.

The central question: is FAQ schema still worth doing?

This is the question almost everyone lands on this topic asking in 2026, so I’ll answer it up front and then justify it:

  • The FAQ rich result is gone — fully removed from Google Search on May 7, 2026, for every site.
  • The FAQPage schema type is not deprecated. It’s still valid schema.org vocabulary, Google says it still parses it to understand your page, and there’s no penalty and no need to remove it.
  • So don’t panic-delete existing markup, and don’t add new FAQ schema expecting the old SERP enhancement — that reward no longer exists. Evaluate FAQ content on its on-page/UX value, not on a schema-ROI case that’s now moot in Google.

Everything below is the detail behind that.

The full timeline — how FAQ rich results were phased out

The single thing most competing articles get loose on is the dates. Here’s the precise version. Google didn’t remove FAQ rich results in one move — there were three distinct stages:

DateWhat happened
August 8, 2023FAQ rich results restricted to “well-known, authoritative government and health websites.” All other sites stop seeing the enhancement regularly.
May 7, 2026FAQ rich results stop appearing in Google Search entirely — including for the gov/health sites that had kept them since 2023. Deprecation notice added to the docs.
June 2026Google removes the FAQ search-appearance filter in Search Console, the FAQ rich result report, and FAQ support in the Rich Results Test.
August 2026Google is scheduled to remove FAQ rich result support from the Search Console API — not yet in effect as of this update.

August 2023 — restricted to government and health sites

Google’s Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results blog post (August 8, 2023) drew the line: going forward, FAQ rich results from FAQPage structured data would only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites, and for all other sites the rich result would no longer be shown regularly. (This was reported contemporaneously by Search Engine Journal, which quoted the post directly.) The reason, per Google’s framing and industry summaries of it, was abuse: sites bolting on artificial FAQ sections purely to grab more SERP real estate, with questions that didn’t match intent and “answers” that existed only to occupy pixels.

This is where a lot of stale content — and, until recently, even this site’s own structured data hub — got stuck: describing the 2023 gov/health state as if it’s still the current state. It isn’t.

May 7, 2026 — fully removed for everyone

On May 7, 2026, Google removed the FAQ rich result entirely. The gov/health carve-out from 2023 went away with it — nobody sees a FAQ rich result in Google now. Google added a deprecation notice to the FAQPage documentation, and coverage from Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal captured the notice verbatim. Google’s own documentation changelog also logged a separate, later entry — dated June 15, 2026 — describing removal of the dedicated FAQ rich-result documentation itself, a distinct step from the May 7 display change. The general FAQPage structured-data reference page (linked in Official Docs below) still exists as of this writing, so read this as Google retiring a standalone FAQ guide, not every FAQ-related doc page disappearing.

June–August 2026 — Google retires its own FAQ tooling

Removing the SERP feature is one thing; Google also wound down the reporting and testing infrastructure around it on a staggered schedule, which is what the deprecation notice spelled out. Per Google’s notice:

“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. To allow time for adjusting your API calls, support for the FAQ rich result in the Search Console API will be removed in August 2026.”

So the Rich Results Test and Search Console’s FAQ report/filter stopped covering FAQ in June 2026. The Search Console API is scheduled to drop FAQ support in August 2026 — as of this update that change hadn’t taken effect yet. If a script of yours already returns nothing for the FAQ search-appearance type in Search Console’s UI, that’s the June change; expect the API call itself to stop returning FAQ data once August 2026 arrives.

What Google says now — the markup is not deprecated

This is the distinction the whole topic hinges on, and it’s where the lower-quality coverage goes wrong: “Google stopped displaying it” is not the same as “the markup is now wrong / harmful / against guidelines.”

Google’s own deprecation-notice wording is about the feature — the rich result — not the vocabulary. The FAQPage, Question, and Answer types remain valid schema.org markup. Google has been consistent that it keeps reading structured data to understand pages even when it no longer produces a visible result, and that its standing policy is: structured data that isn’t being used doesn’t need to be proactively removed and doesn’t cause problems for Search. (I’d point at a primary Search Central line for that exact sentence, but the cleanest version of it in my research was captured secondhand — treat it as the well-established Google policy it is rather than a fresh verbatim quote.)

There’s a broader rep signal here too. When people saw the FAQ removal alongside a run of other structured-data type retirements, John Mueller pushed back on the “schema is dying” framing, saying Google is not killing schema — the supported set gets trimmed of old or redundant types while the ones that meaningfully help Search are kept, more haircut than funeral (reported by Search Engine Roundtable). One caveat I want to be straight about: that comment appears to be about the broader wave of structured-data retirements, not FAQPage specifically, so I’m treating it as general context on Google’s posture toward schema — not as FAQ-specific commentary.

Bottom line from Google’s side: no penalty, no need to remove, still parsed for understanding — just no rich result.

FAQPage structure and example JSON-LD

The markup itself hasn’t changed; it’s worth knowing regardless, because it’s still valid schema.org vocabulary and Bing has announced no equivalent removal. This is a statement about schema.org validity, not a claim about current Google rich-result eligibility — that feature is gone. The minimum valid structure is:

FAQPagemainEntity (an array of Question items) → each Question has a name (the question text) and an acceptedAnswer (an Answer whose text holds the answer, which may include some basic HTML like links).

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "mainEntity": [
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "name": "Do I need to remove FAQPage schema now that the rich result is gone?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "No. The rich result is gone, but the FAQPage markup is still valid, causes no problems, and Google still reads it. There's no penalty for leaving it in place."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "name": "Has Bing made the same change to FAQ rich results as Google?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "No. Bing has not announced any equivalent restriction or removal — this is a Google-specific change."
      }
    }
  ]
}

A few property notes: mainEntity is inherited from CreativeWork and holds the array of questions; Question (schema.org/Question) also documents answerCount and suggestedAnswer, but for FAQ you want a single acceptedAnswer per question; the answer body lives in Answer.text. That single-authoritative-answer shape is exactly what distinguishes FAQPage from QAPage. Evidence for this claim FAQPage uses Question entities and acceptedAnswer Answer entities to represent publisher-authored questions and answers. Scope: Schema.org vocabulary; QAPage models a different community-answer use case. Confidence: high · Verified: Schema.org: FAQPage

FAQPage vs. QAPage — don’t confuse them

This is the freshest, most useful distinction to get right, because a lot of coverage smears “FAQ schema” and “Q&A schema” together, and they are different types with different eligibility:

FAQPageQAPage
Who writes the answersThe page ownerThe community / users
Answers per questionOne authoritative acceptedAnswerPotentially many (a top answer + others)
Typical pageA brand/help/FAQ pageA forum thread, Q&A/Stack Overflow-style page
Google rich resultRemoved (May 7, 2026)Still supported

If your page is genuinely a community Q&A with multiple user-submitted answers, that’s QAPage — a separate, still-supported type — not FAQPage. Reaching for QAPage on a page you control and answer yourself is just as wrong as reaching for FAQPage on a forum thread. This distinction is why FAQPage sits in the Social & Community schema group alongside QAPage and DiscussionForumPosting: they’re the “who’s doing the talking” family of types, and only some of them lost their rich result.

QAPage isn’t just theoretically still around, either: Google’s own documentation changelog recorded an update to QAPage’s supported properties on March 24, 2026 — a sign the type is actively maintained, not a stale leftover. That’s a different claim than “QAPage will show a rich result for your specific query” — confirm current eligibility for your own pages with the Rich Results Test rather than assuming blanket support.

Does FAQ schema still help with AI search or AI Overviews?

Here’s a claim I see everywhere with zero evidence behind it: “FAQ schema boosts your AI Overview / LLM citations, so it’s worth doing for that reason alone.” Be skeptical.

There’s no confirmed Google linkage between FAQ structured data and AI Overview inclusion. Google says no special Schema.org markup is required for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Evidence for this claim Google says there is no special Schema.org markup required to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Scope: Google Search AI-features guidance; FAQPage markup should not be presented as a confirmed AI-citation lever. Confidence: high · Verified: Google: AI features and your website The best data point I found doesn’t support an AI-citation lift either: an Ahrefs test reported by Search Engine Journal measured ChatGPT citations across roughly 1,885 pages before and after adding schema markup (pooling multiple schema types together, not testing FAQPage specifically) and found only a +2.2% change — small enough that the researchers themselves called it “too small to tell apart from random variation.” I’d treat that as a null result, not evidence of a lift or a penalty, and it isn’t an FAQPage-specific test. Either way, it’s enough to knock down the confident “FAQ schema is an AI-citation lever” assertion — the data doesn’t support it.

The distinction that actually holds up: well-structured Q&A content — clear questions, direct answers, scannable format — genuinely helps LLMs extract and reuse your material, and it helps human readers too. That value comes from the content and its structure on the page, and LLMs can read it whether or not it’s wrapped in FAQPage JSON-LD. The FAQPage markup itself has no demonstrated AI-citation lift. Write good FAQ content; don’t do it for the schema.

Does Bing still use FAQ schema?

This is a Google-specific change, not an industry-wide one. Bing has not announced any restriction or removal of FAQ rich results, and industry reporting in 2026 says Bing (and the engines on its index, like DuckDuckGo and Brave Search) continues to process FAQPage markup — though I haven’t independently reconfirmed that against a Bing-owned primary source in this pass, so treat it as industry-reported rather than Bing-official. Bing doesn’t publish a standalone FAQ rich-result spec page — it supports the shared schema.org vocabulary through its general structured-data documentation — so the accurate framing is “no deprecation announced by Bing,” not “Bing currently shows FAQ rich results for every query,” which isn’t something this pass independently verified.

Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, has separately confirmed — in the broader structured-data context — that schema markup helps Microsoft’s LLMs and Copilot understand content (via Search Engine Land), which is already cited on this site’s structured data hub. That’s general, not FAQ-specific, but it’s a fair reason not to assume FAQ markup is “dead everywhere” just because Google stopped displaying it.

What FAQPage schema is still good for

Strip away the rich result and there’s still a real, if smaller, case for FAQ content (note: content, not necessarily the markup):

  • On-page UX. A clean FAQ section lets users scan for the objection or detail that’s blocking them, which matters most right before a conversion.
  • Internal linking. Answer.text accepts basic HTML, so answers can link out to your deeper pages — a legitimate way to route authority and readers.
  • Content organization for humans and machines. Structured Q&A is easy for people to read and easy for engines and LLMs to parse — even without a Google rich-result reward, and potentially in Bing too, where no equivalent removal has been announced.

So: keep your existing FAQPage markup (it’s harmless and Google says it still reads it), keep writing genuinely useful FAQ content where it serves readers, and just stop treating the Google FAQ rich result as a reason to do either — because it’s gone.

For where FAQPage sits in the wider picture, see the broader Structured Data and Schema Markup hubs this article nests under, and the QAPage schema sibling for the community-Q&A side of this family.

Add an expert note

Pin an expert quote

New person? Create their unclaimed profile at /admin/experts/ → Pin an expert quote first.