Google Removes FAQ Rich Results from Search (May 2026 Update)

A change that many in the SEO industry had been anticipating since 2023 became official on May 7, 2026: Google dropped FAQ rich results from Search. FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search, and Google will be dropping the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and support in the Rich Results Test in June 2026. Support for the FAQ rich result in the Search Console API will be removed in August 2026 to allow time for adjusting API calls.

For Melbourne businesses with FAQ structured data on their websites, and for anyone using FAQPage schema as part of their SEO or content strategy, this update requires a clear-eyed assessment of what has actually changed, what has not, and what the right response is. The noise around this announcement has been considerable — and some of it unhelpful.

What FAQ Rich Results Were — and Why They Mattered?

FAQ Schema first became available in 2019. Google introduced it as part of a wave of new structured data types that year, alongside HowTo and Q&A Schema. The feature briefly offered some of the most visible organic real estate available to digital marketers.

At their peak, FAQ rich results produced expandable question-and-answer dropdowns directly beneath a search listing, dramatically increasing the vertical space a result occupied on the SERP and often improving click-through rates significantly. For businesses that had implemented FAQPage markup correctly, it was one of the most effective single structured data wins available in search.

The appeal was obvious, and adoption spread quickly — including among businesses that implemented FAQ sections not because the content served users, but because the visual SERP enhancement served the business. That pattern contributed directly to what came next.

The Road to May 2026: How This Depreciation Developed

The May 2026 announcement is not a sudden change. The deprecation completes a process that began in August 2023, when Google announced that FAQ rich results would only appear for well-known authoritative government and health websites going forward. The 2023 restriction was a response to widespread abuse of the FAQ schema. Sites had been adding artificial FAQ sections to inflate their SERP real estate, often with questions that did not match user intent or answers that existed only to occupy more pixels.

The full timeline shows a clear pattern. In April 2023, Google reduced FAQ rich result visibility ahead of a formal announcement noted in a Search Console notification. In August 2023, Google formally announced restrictions, limiting FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health websites, and HowTo rich results were removed from mobile. In September 2023, HowTo rich results were fully deprecated on desktop as well. On May 7, 2026, Google ended all FAQ rich results, including for government and health sites.

For most websites, the practical impact of this change had already been felt for nearly three years. For most websites, this was the formal end of a feature that had been functionally absent for almost three years. What the May 2026 announcement does is close the door entirely — including for the government and health sites that retained limited access — and set a retirement timeline for all Search Console reporting and API support associated with the feature.

The Full Deprecation Timeline: Three Dates to Know

The notice spells out a removal timeline that runs from May through August 2026. The first change is already live. As of May 7, FAQ rich results no longer appear in Google Search. Sites that previously qualified for the feature, including the government and health domains that kept it after 2023, no longer see their FAQ markup rendered as expandable dropdowns in search results. The visual SERP feature is gone. In June 2026, Google will remove FAQ-related reporting from Search Console — the rich result status report for FAQ markup, which let site owners track how many of their FAQ-marked pages were eligible for the feature, will be retired. The Rich Results Test will also stop supporting FAQ markup at that point. In August 2026, Google will remove FAQ rich result support from the Search Console API.

The practical implication for any team pulling FAQ rich result data through automated reporting pipelines or custom dashboards is that they have until August to adjust those calls. Any historical FAQ rich result performance data currently accessible in Search Console will disappear from the reporting interface in June. Export your historical FAQ rich results reporting before June 2026 and compare CTR on the pages that used to show FAQ dropdowns to understand how the change has affected your traffic patterns.

What Has NOT Changed — The Critical Distinction

This is where a lot of the reaction to this announcement has been imprecise, and where getting the detail right actually matters for your site.

FAQ rich results — the expandable question-and-answer dropdowns that used to appear beneath certain search listings — are no longer shown in Google Search. FAQPage structured data is still valid markup. Google’s own documentation, updated May 7, 2026, states that you do not need to remove it — structured data that is not being used does not cause problems for Search.

Google’s documentation still notes that FAQ structured data can stay in place. The markup will not cause problems, but it also will not produce visible results in Google Search.

This distinction — between a rich result (a display feature in Google Search) and structured data (a machine-readable signal about page content) — is the most important thing to understand about this update. Google has removed the visual SERP treatment. It has not deprecated the FAQPage schema type. It has not said FAQ content is unhelpful. It has not been said that question-and-answer sections should be removed from websites.

Google states that it will continue to use FAQ structured data to better understand pages, even though it will no longer display the rich result. The line confirms what some SEO professionals have argued since the 2023 restriction: structured data and rich results are two different things. Schema markup tells Google what a page is about in machine-readable form. Rich results are a display feature that uses some structured data to render visual SERP elements.

This matters enormously for the keep-or-remove decision that many site owners are now facing.

Should You Keep or Remove FAQ Schema?

If a page has an FAQ schema where the questions and answers are visible on the page, useful to a reader, and not templated, keep the schema. It is an honest description of the page, and AI systems, Bing, voice assistants, and RAG pipelines continue to consume it. The cost of keeping it is zero. The cost of removing it is one extraction signal lost across multiple AI consumers, for no offsetting benefit.

Other search engines like Bing, Yandex, and regional search platforms may still display FAQ rich results based on properly implemented schema markup. If your website receives significant traffic from search engines other than Google, maintaining FAQ structured data may still provide value.

The case for removing FAQ markup is stronger where it was added artificially — questions that do not genuinely reflect content on the page, FAQ sections added purely to qualify for rich results with no real user value, or templated FAQ blocks duplicated across thousands of pages where the questions are generic and the answers add nothing. That category of implementation arguably never deserved the rich result treatment it received, and removing it is a reasonable cleanup exercise.

Our technical SEO services include structured data audits that help identify which FAQ markup is genuine and worth preserving, and which was added for SERP feature reasons and can now be deprioritised or removed cleanly. This is a more nuanced assessment than a blanket keep-or-remove decision, and it is worth doing properly rather than reactively.

What This Means for Your SEO and Content Strategy?

The removal of FAQ rich results reinforces a direction that Google’s structured data decisions have consistently signalled over the past three years: visual SERP enhancements earned through schema manipulation are being withdrawn, and what remains is the underlying content quality that structured data was always meant to describe rather than substitute for.

The end of FAQ rich results closes one of the most recognisable chapters in modern SEO’s structured data, but it does not change the core job of search content. People still arrive with uncertainty. They still compare options. They still need clear definitions, explanations of processes, and practical next steps before they act. The websites that continue earning attention will be the ones that answer those needs directly, without relying on interface enhancements to do the work for them.

For Melbourne businesses that had good FAQ content — content that genuinely answered the questions their prospective customers were asking — the May 2026 change removes a visual advantage but does not remove the underlying value of that content. Well-structured, genuinely useful answers to real user questions will continue to support search visibility through the content’s quality and relevance, even without the expandable dropdown treatment.

For businesses whose FAQ sections were thin, templated, or created primarily for the rich result rather than for users, this is a useful forcing function to reassess. The content writing services approach that produces durable search visibility in 2026 is exactly the kind of genuine, user-first content that does not depend on a single structured data feature to deliver value.

The AI Dimension: FAQ Schema and AI Search

The timing of the announcement has drawn attention from practitioners because FAQ schema has appeared in some AI search-focused advice as a way to make content easier for AI systems to parse. Google has not connected the deprecation to that trend. The company did not explain adding the deprecation notice to its documentation.

FAQ rich results were an early, clunky bridge: they expanded the snippet, but they still nudged people toward your page for context. The new model is Google ingesting your content and returning a synthesised response under Google’s own UI. Removing FAQ rich results clears the space and helps normalise the idea that the SERP itself is where the answer lives.

This observation connects to broader shifts in how search is evolving — shifts that our blog on the Google algorithm update landscape and AI Overview CTR analysis cover in detail. The search experience is increasingly one in which AI-generated answers synthesise content from multiple sources, and the structured data signals that help AI systems understand page content — including, potentially, FAQPage markup — remain relevant even when they no longer produce visual SERP features.

The implication for on-page SEO strategy is not to chase structured data types that produce SERP features, but to build content that is structurally clear, factually accurate, and genuinely useful — content that earns citations in AI-generated answers as much as it earns clicks from traditional organic listings. Our broader coverage of digital marketing trends for 2026 covers this evolving landscape in more depth.

Practical Actions for Melbourne Businesses Right Now

Before June 2026: Export your historical FAQ rich result performance data from Google Search Console. Once the reporting is removed in June, that data is gone. Understanding which pages benefited from FAQ rich results — and by how much — is valuable context for assessing any traffic changes that may result from the May 7 change.

Audit your FAQ structured data: Identify pages with FAQPage markup and assess each honestly. If the questions and answers are real, visible on the page, and useful to a reader, the markup is worth keeping. If it was added as a thin layer over weak content primarily to earn a SERP feature, this is a good time to either strengthen the underlying content or remove the markup.

Assess traffic impact: If your CTR previously benefited from the feature, your traffic patterns may still change as a result. That is why title tags, meta descriptions, page intent matching, and on-page clarity matter even more now. If specific pages show click-through rate decline in the weeks following May 7, improving the meta description’s clarity and appeal is the most direct response.

Do not panic-remove all FAQ content: The deprecation applies to the visual SERP treatment, not to the value of question-and-answer content. Strong FAQ sections that genuinely address user needs are still worth having — they just will not produce expandable dropdowns in Google Search anymore.

Our SEO services for Melbourne businesses and free SEO audit for Melbourne businesses are the practical starting points for understanding how this change specifically affects your website’s structured data and whether your FAQ content strategy needs adjustment.

The Broader Pattern: Google’s Structured Data Direction

The two-step sequence — restrict eligibility, then remove the feature entirely — is not new. Google did the same thing with HowTo rich results, deprecated entirely on desktop in September 2023 after a period of mobile-only restriction. The pattern reads as a Google policy: when a structured data feature gets aggressively scaled by SEO tooling and stops faithfully describing the page, the rich result is withdrawn before the markup is. The schema layer remains as something machines can still parse if it accurately describes what the page actually contains.

This pattern is worth understanding as a signal about where Google’s structured data strategy is heading. The structured data types that survive are the ones that serve as accurate machine-readable descriptions of page content — not the ones that function primarily as mechanisms for earning SERP real estate. The distinction matters for how you approach structured data across your entire site, not just for FAQ pages.

Our off-page SEO and technical SEO teams work with Melbourne businesses to keep their structured data strategies aligned with where Google is heading, rather than optimising for features that may be deprecated in the next update cycle.

Conclusion

Google’s May 7, 2026 removal of FAQ rich results from Search is a meaningful change with a clear timeline and an important nuance: it removes a visual SERP feature, not a content type or a schema standard. Businesses with genuine, well-structured FAQ content have nothing to remove from their websites. Businesses whose FAQ sections were thin or artificially created for SERP feature purposes have an opportunity to reassess.

The practical actions — exporting historical data before June, auditing structured data, assessing traffic impact, and strengthening core on-page elements — are manageable and straightforward. The strategic response is unchanged from what good SEO has always required: create content that genuinely serves users, structure it clearly for both humans and machines, and do not build your traffic strategy around any single SERP feature.

If you would like a clear assessment of how the May 2026 FAQ change affects your specific website and what the right structured data response looks like for your business, get in touch with our Melbourne SEO team.

Source: Google Search Central Developer Documentation (updated May 7, 2026)