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Google Drops FAQ Rich Results from Search

Google has stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search as of 7 May 2026, completing a deprecation process that began with visibility restrictions in 2023. The FAQPage structured data type will remain in Google’s documentation but will no longer produce any visible result in Google Search.

From restriction to removal

FAQ rich results have been declining for three years. In April 2023, Google reduced their visibility significantly across general search results. In August 2023, the feature was restricted further: only well-known government and health websites remained eligible. For all other sites, FAQ rich results stopped appearing at that point.

The May 2026 change removes the feature entirely. Even the government and health sites that had retained access will no longer see FAQ-style expandable questions in their search results.

Google cited the move as part of a broader effort to simplify the search results page. With the feature already limited to a narrow set of sites and seeing low usage, maintaining it as a distinct rich result type offered diminishing returns.

What is changing and when

The deprecation is rolling out in three stages.

7 May 2026 (complete). FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search. Sites that previously qualified will see impressions for this result type fall to zero.

June 2026. Google will remove the FAQ search appearance from Search Console, drop the FAQ rich result report, and end support for FAQPage testing in the Rich Results Test tool. Teams using the Rich Results Test to validate FAQ markup should note that it will no longer return results for this type.

August 2026. Google will remove FAQ rich result support from the Search Console API. Any integrations or automated reporting pipelines that query this data type will need updating before then.

Should you remove the markup?

Google’s position is that there is no immediate need to strip FAQPage schema from your pages. Structured data that Google no longer uses does not cause a ranking penalty; it is simply ignored. If your site uses a schema plugin or CMS template that generates the markup automatically, you can leave it in place without concern.

That said, there are a few reasons you might choose to audit and remove it. Clean markup reduces page weight marginally and simplifies future audits. Other platforms, including Bing and some AI-powered tools, may still process FAQPage schema, so whether removal makes sense depends on how broadly you target across search engines.

If you do remove it, there is no technical rush. The August 2026 API deadline is the most operationally significant date for teams running Search Console reporting, not a hard cutoff for the markup itself.

What this means

For most sites, the traffic impact will be minimal. FAQ rich results were already unavailable to the vast majority of domains following the 2023 restrictions. If your site fell outside the government or health categories, you have not seen FAQ rich result impressions in Search Console for the past three years.

For the small number of sites that retained access after 2023, impressions for the FAQ search appearance will drop to zero in the coming weeks. CTR and traffic from those appearances will follow. The scale of the effect depends on how prominent FAQ results were in your overall impression share, which was itself limited by the restricted eligibility criteria.

The broader lesson from FAQ rich results tracks consistently with Google’s direction on structured data: schema that directly aids Google’s understanding of content (Product, Article, HowTo where still active, Review) retains value; schema that primarily decorated search results for visual differentiation has been scaled back repeatedly since 2022.

Content quality, clear page structure, and direct answers to specific questions remain the primary signals Google uses to determine visibility in both standard results and AI-generated features like AI Overviews.

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