Google removes FAQ rich results from Search

Google has stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search. The change took effect on 7 May 2026, according to a notice Google added to its own structured data documentation, and it closes out a phase-out that started in August 2023. The feature is gone from the results page; the schema itself is not gone from the web.

What Google actually said#

Google did not publish a blog post about the removal. The only public record is a notice added to the FAQ structured data documentation, later folded into the Search Central changelog: “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.”

Three dates follow from that notice. FAQ rich results stopped appearing on 7 May 2026. The search appearance filter, the rich result report and Rich Results Test support go in June 2026. Search Console API support for the FAQ rich result type ends in August 2026, giving teams pulling that data a window to adjust their calls before it disappears.

A three-year phase-out, not a single decision#

This did not happen in one step. In August 2023, Google restricted FAQ rich results to well-known, authoritative government and health sites, cutting the feature for everyone else. The same period narrowed HowTo rich results to mobile only, before removing them entirely by September 2023. May 2026 finishes the job Google started then: the last sites still eligible for a FAQ rich result, the authoritative government and health properties, lose it too.

Neither removal came with a stated reason from Google beyond the documentation notices themselves. The pattern across both is the same: a feature narrows in scope first, then disappears once the narrower version stops being worth maintaining.

What to do with FAQPage markup now#

Google’s documentation is explicit that unused structured data does not cause problems for Search, and FAQPage is still a valid Schema.org type. There is no stated penalty for leaving the markup in place, only the loss of the Google feature it used to produce.

The markup is not only read by Google, either. Bingbot, PerplexityBot and other retrieval-focused crawlers used by AI answer systems still parse FAQPage data on the open web. Removing it would strip a machine-readable answer format that those systems can still use, in exchange for a Google feature that is no longer there to lose. Keeping the markup costs nothing measurable; stripping it trades away a format other consumers still read for no offsetting benefit on Google.

Why we care#

A rich result disappearing is routine. What is worth tracking is the shape of the decision: Google narrowed FAQ eligibility for three years before cutting it entirely, gave no public explanation beyond a documentation notice, and left the underlying schema untouched. That is the pattern to watch for the next rich result on a restricted eligibility list, and it is a reminder that structured data now has an audience beyond the search engine that popularized it.