TL;DR
Google has switched off the expandable Q&A boxes that used to appear under some search listings. The change took effect on 7 May 2026.
This isn’t sudden. Google restricted the feature in 2023 to government and health sites, and has now removed it entirely.
You don’t need to delete the FAQ code from your website. Google still uses it to understand your pages, even though the visual feature is gone.
Stop adding FAQ sections just to grab more space in search results. Keep them where the questions and answers are genuinely useful.
The bigger shift is AI search. Effort that used to go into SERP tricks should now go into being clearly understood by AI Overviews and similar tools.
For nearly a decade, FAQ schema has been one of the most overused tactics in SEO.
Add structured data, get an expanded SERP listing, lift your click-through.
As of 7 May 2026, the rich result is gone, and a long-running shortcut has finally closed.
Google confirmed the change in its developer documentation.
FAQ rich results no longer appear in Google Search, and the supporting infrastructure is being retired across the rest of the year:
June 2026: FAQ search appearance, the rich result report, and Rich Results Test support all retired
August 2026: Search Console API support for FAQ rich results removed
If your reporting workflows depend on FAQ rich result data, export it now. After August it won’t be retrievable.
This Was Always Going to Happen
The 2026 update isn’t a surprise.
It completes a phase-out Google began in August 2023, when it restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health websites. Commercial sites lost the feature overnight, even with perfectly valid schema in place.
The 2023 restriction was a response to abuse.
FAQ schema had become a SERP real estate hack: sites added artificial Q&A blocks with questions nobody had asked, padded with answers written for Google rather than users.
The result was a degraded SERP and an SEO industry chasing a tactic that had already lost its meaning.
What happened on 7 May simply finishes the job.
The display feature is now retired for every category of site, including the gov and health domains that kept it alive between 2023 and now.
The Distinction Most Coverage Is Missing
The headline story is that FAQ rich results are dead.
The more important story is that FAQ structured data is not.
Google has stated explicitly that the markup will continue to inform how its systems understand pages, even though it no longer renders a visual rich result. That distinction is the one worth holding onto.
Schema markup is a comprehension layer.
It tells Google, in machine-readable form, what a page is about.
Rich results are a separate display feature that uses some of that data to render visual SERP elements. Google has retired the display.
The comprehension layer remains, and it’s the one that matters now.
This isn’t a small technicality.
AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the broader AI search ecosystem all depend on the comprehension layer to decide which sources to retrieve and which to cite.
Clear, well-structured pages get pulled into AI-generated answers.
Pages that Google can’t parse cleanly do not.
Should You Remove FAQ Schema?
Our recommendation: leave it in place.
The markup isn’t doing anything visible, but it isn’t hurting anything either.
Other search engines may still process it, and Google has explicitly said the schema continues to inform how it understands your pages.
The cost of stripping it out outweighs the upside. If you keep it, make sure the questions and answers reflect real user intent rather than padding.
What you should stop doing is treating FAQ schema as a CTR tactic. The shortcut that defined a lot of SEO templates between 2020 and 2023 has run its course.
The Bigger Shift This Sits Inside
FAQ rich results were always a transitional feature.
They expanded the snippet, but they still pushed users to your page for the full answer.
The current direction of search is different.
Google ingests your content and returns a synthesised response under its own UI, often without an obvious click anywhere.
This is the environment our Searchlight framework is built for. Brands that win in AI search are not the ones gaming SERP features.
They’re the ones publishing genuinely authoritative content with the structural clarity that AI systems can extract, and the entity-level signals that get them recognised across the broader retrieval ecosystem.
The retirement of FAQ rich results is a small story. The shift it sits inside is the one worth getting in front of.
What We're Telling Clients
- Audit pages currently using FAQPage schema and note baseline metrics from before 7 May.
- Export historical Search Console reports for FAQ-rich appearances before the August 2026 API retirement.
- Monitor affected pages for CTR changes over the 6 to 12 weeks following 7 May.
- Stop deploying FAQ blocks as a templated tactic where the Q&A isn’t genuinely useful.
- Redirect that effort into AI search visibility: clear answers, strong entity signals, and schema that represents what’s actually on the page.
If you want a review of where your structured data sits today, and how it’s positioning you for AI search rather than for SERP features that no longer exist, get in touch.
