FAQ structured data schema guide

What happened to FAQ

Google long showed rich results for FAQ structured data, giving a page an expanded, accordion-style appearance in some searches. In August 2023 Google restricted that rich result to "well-known, authoritative government and health websites", so most sites lost it. Then, on 7 May 2026, Google retired the FAQ rich result entirely, closing even that narrow exception. From that date the FAQ rich result no longer appears for any site, and Google removed the related Search Console reporting and Rich Results Test support.

The important conclusion is not "remove your schema". FAQ schema is still valid structured data, and a clean, well-formed machine-readable Q and A can still help you document questions, keep the page structured, and give search and AI systems a clear representation of the content. The change removed the dedicated visual rich-result treatment, not the ability to describe content with schema.

Writing the schema

The markup uses FAQPage from schema.org with one mainEntity per question, each holding a Question with an acceptedAnswer whose Answer contains the text:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "mainEntity": [
    {
  "@type": "Question",
  "name": "What is a FAQ page?",
  "acceptedAnswer": {
    "@type": "Answer",
    "text": "A FAQ page collects the questions users ask most and gives each a concise answer."
  }
    }
  ]
}

Conditions to follow:

• One mainEntity per question, each Question must have exactly one acceptedAnswer.
• Mark up questions that are the visible content of the page. Do not invent questions that do not appear.
• Keep name (or headline) matching the on-page question text.
• Use a single FAQPage block, not one block per question.
• Test the output in the Rich Results Test or a validator, because malformed JSON can suppress anything the schema might do.

When to use it now

Judge FAQ schema by whether the markup genuinely represents a page of questions and answers, not by whether you expect a rich result. Good reasons to keep it:

• The page is a real FAQ and the schema is accurate and well-formed.
• You want a clean structured representation that other consumers, such as AI systems or extraction tools, can read.
• You already maintain structured data and consistency is cheap.

Drop it only if the page is not really a FAQ, or if you prefer to minimise schema bloat. FAQ schema does not substitute for a real answer on the page, and it never should: search systems weigh the visible content above any markup.

Match the schema style to the rest of your site, as covered in structured data basics and how one feature sits alongside breadcrumb schema. Distinguish FAQ from the news or article types where the semantics are article-, not question-, based, and keep entity descriptions consistent with schema entity modelling.