Should you still add FAQ schema?
Mostly no. In August 2023 Google restricted FAQ rich results to a narrow set of sites, announcing in its official blog post that “FAQ (from FAQPage structured data) rich results will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites.” For everyone else, the dropdown is gone. Real FAQ content on the page still helps answer engines, and valid markup does no harm, but the markup no longer buys the rich result.
What changed in August 2023
On August 8, 2023, Google announced it was reducing the visibility of FAQ rich results, the expandable question-and-answer dropdowns that used to appear under a listing in search results. The restriction was explicit. The rich result would be reserved for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For every other site, the post says plainly: “For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown regularly.” A follow-up update on September 14, 2023 went further on the sibling type and deprecated How-To rich results entirely.
That was not a temporary experiment. It was a permanent simplification of the results page, rolled out globally within a week of the announcement. If your business is not a government agency or a recognized health authority, FAQPage markup stopped earning you the dropdown almost three years ago.
Why the advice you keep reading is stale
The internet did not get the memo. Search for FAQ schema today and you will find guides, plugin documentation, and agency checklists that still promise rich results in exchange for the markup. Most of that content was written before August 2023 and never updated. Some of it was written after and copied from the stale sources anyway. The advice compounds because it sounds plausible and used to be true.
The tell is what the advice promises. If a guide, a plugin, or an audit report tells you FAQPage markup will get you an expandable rich result in Google, that claim contradicts Google's own announcement. It is not a judgment call. The change is documented, dated, and unambiguous. Any tool still recommending FAQ schema for rich results is reading from a 2022 playbook, and you should ask what else in its report is that old.
What still makes sense
Here is what survives the change, because it was never about the markup. Real question-and-answer content on the page is genuinely useful to answer engines. An AI engine looking for a quotable answer wants a direct question followed by a direct answer, and a well-written FAQ section is exactly that shape. That value comes from the visible words, not from the JSON-LD wrapped around them.
The markup itself is neutral. Google's announcement addressed this directly: “While you can drop this structured data from your site, there's no need to proactively remove it.” And further: “Structured data that's not being used does not cause problems for Search, but also has no visible effects in Google Search.” Valid FAQPage markup will not hurt you. It will also not visibly do anything in Google. Treat it as optional bookkeeping, never as a growth lever.
<!-- What helps answer engines: real, visible Q&A content --> <h2>How long does a roof replacement take?</h2> <p>Most residential replacements take 1 to 3 days. Roof size and weather move that number.</p> <!-- Optional. Valid, harmless, and it will NOT earn a rich result --> <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [{ "@type": "Question", "name": "How long does a roof replacement take?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Most residential replacements take 1 to 3 days." } }] } </script>
So the honest priority order is this. Write the questions your customers actually ask, on the page, in plain language, with direct answers. If your CMS emits FAQPage markup alongside that content, keep it valid and let it be. If it does not, do not spend an afternoon adding it in pursuit of a rich result that Google's own blog says will not appear.
Be honest: what we flag, and what we refuse to flag
Our audit does not tell you to add FAQ schema for rich results, because the documentation says it will not get them. We think a tool that recommends work the docs contradict is selling you busywork, and busywork billed as SEO is the exact folklore this library exists to kill. What we do check is the part that still matters: whether your page contains direct, quotable answers to the questions it claims to cover, and whether any structured data you do have parses cleanly. If FAQPage markup on your site is broken, we flag it as broken markup, not as a missed rich-result opportunity.
Verify: check the claim against the docs
If someone tells you to add FAQ schema, verify the promise before you pay for the work. Read the August 2023 announcement yourself and check whether your site is a well-known government or health authority. If it is not, the rich result is off the table, and any Search Console FAQ search-appearance data you still see reflects the restricted reality, not an opportunity.
Then check what your page actually gives an answer engine. Re-run an audit on the live URL and confirm the visible content answers real questions directly, with clean markup behind it. You can do this by hand, or paste your link into our AEO checker or the full Brimm audit and we will read the page the way a crawler does, report what is quotable and what is not, and print the gaps in fix order. If you want the broader context on how answer engines pick their sources, our guide on answer engine optimization covers it, and the rest of the fix library walks through the other failures we find most.