Spoke
Question markup, after the rich result went away
FAQ rich results were deprecated in May 2026. The FAQPage type wasn't. Knowing which of those is true saves you from the stale advice and from the overcorrection.
The deprecation date and the removal of the documentation are stated on Google's own FAQPage reference, recorded in our ledger. That no special schema is required for AI features is stated in Google's generative AI guidance.
For years the advice was: add FAQ markup, get an expanded search result.
That result is gone. A lot of advice hasn't noticed.
Google deprecated the FAQ rich result feature, which stopped appearing in Google Search on May 7, 2026. The documentation for the feature was removed on June 15, 2026. The FAQPage structured data type itself was not deprecated — only the Search feature it powered.
This matters because a large amount of still-circulating SEO advice recommends FAQ markup as a way to win expanded search results. That result no longer exists.
Should I still use FAQPage schema?
Only if your page genuinely is a list of questions and answers and you want that structure stated explicitly. The reason most people added it — the expanded FAQ result in Google Search — doesn't exist anymore, so adding it for that reason achieves nothing.
The type itself wasn't deprecated and remains valid vocabulary. What changed is the payoff, not the validity.
Two wrong conclusions
"FAQ schema still gets you expanded results." Stale. The feature stopped appearing in May 2026 and the documentation came down the following month.
"FAQPage is deprecated, strip it all out." An overcorrection. The Search feature was deprecated. The structured data type wasn't. Pulling valid markup off a page that genuinely is a set of questions and answers gains you nothing either.
The distinction is the one structured data makes generally: schema.org vocabulary and what a search engine supports as a feature are two different lists. Only the second one changed.
So what's it for now
Saying, in a way a machine can read, that this passage is a question and that one is its answer. Which is true of the page regardless of what any engine does with it.
That's a weaker reason than a rich result, and it's an honest one. Costs nothing on a page that already has the structure. Not worth retrofitting onto pages that don't.
What it is not is a route to AI citations. Google's guidance says there's no special markup you need to add, and names over-focusing on structured data among the things that confer no advantage. Anybody selling FAQ markup as a GEO technique is selling the dead play with new vocabulary on it.
Don't reach for QAPage
Different type, different thing. QAPage is for a page with a user-submitted question and community answers — a forum thread. It is not another label for your marketing FAQ.
Putting it on a page you wrote yourself misrepresents what the page is. That's the general failure mode for structured data, and it's the one that attracts a manual action.
What we do here
We used to emit FAQPage on every page that contained an answer block. Nearly all of those carried a single question each, and it was wrong.
Google's guidance is that FAQPage describes a page that is a list of frequently asked questions. An article with one embedded Q&A isn't that. It was over-markup of exactly the kind this section tells you to avoid, on a site whose claim is that it follows its own advice — so we took it off.
Now it appears only where a page genuinely is a run of questions and answers. The answer passages themselves didn't change: they're still in the HTML, still quotable, still in the search index and in llms.txt. The only thing that went away was a schema claim that wasn't true.
More in AEO
Answer-first writing
The first sentence under a question heading is the only part guaranteed to be read, quoted or extracted. Here is how to write one that works with nothing around it, and the before-and-after that shows the difference.
Question headings
A heading tells a reader what's coming and tells a machine what the passage is about. Those used to pull against each other. Mostly they don't anymore.
Extractable formatting
Six steps in a paragraph and six steps in a list carry the same information to a reader. To a machine they're nothing alike, and that difference decides whether you get quoted precisely or approximately.
Snippets & voice
Before AI answers there were snippets and voice assistants, which also had to pick one answer instead of listing ten. Everything this section teaches was worked out against those.