For years, adding FAQPage structured data was one of the quickest wins in SEO: your search result could expand with questions and answers and take up much more space on the page. That changed in August 2023, and a lot of advice online has not caught up.
What changed in 2023
In August 2023, Google announced that FAQ rich results would only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For everyone else, the expandable questions under a search result stopped appearing regularly. At the same time, HowTo rich results were cut back, and they were later phased out of Google Search altogether.
Google’s own advice was that there is no need to remove existing FAQ markup. Valid structured data does no harm. It simply no longer produces the visual result most sites wanted.
So why do we still write FAQs?
Because the reason FAQs worked was never the markup alone. A good FAQ section does three things that matter even more now that AI tools write answers:
- It matches how people ask. Questions in natural language mirror the prompts people type into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode.
- It gives a short, quotable answer. An answer engine needs a clear statement it can lift and attribute. A two-sentence answer directly below a question is exactly that.
- It removes objections. Prices, timescales, cancellation, what is included: answering these on the page helps the visitor decide, whatever brought them there.
FAQPage markup then labels that content precisely for machines. It does not guarantee anything in AI answers. Nobody outside the companies building these systems can promise that. But it makes your questions and answers unambiguous, and in our GEO projects FAQ-first page structure has been part of the work alongside citations growth, for example in the Aspen Dental case study.
How to write FAQs that are worth marking up
- Use real questions. Take them from customer emails, sales calls, reviews and site search, not from a list of keywords with “what is” in front.
- Answer in the first sentence. “Yes, you can cancel up to 24 hours before your appointment.” Then give the detail.
- Keep one question per topic. Five variations of the same question dilute the page and look like keyword stuffing.
- Put the FAQ where it helps. Service pages, product pages and location pages each deserve their own questions. A single giant FAQ page is less useful than relevant questions on the page where the decision happens.
- Keep answers current. An out-of-date price in an FAQ is worse than no FAQ.
Marking it up correctly
- Only mark up questions and answers that are visible on the page.
- Use FAQPage for questions the site owner answers. Use QAPage only where users submit answers, as on a forum.
- Do not use FAQ markup for advertising, and do not put the same FAQ markup on every page of the site.
- Validate with the Schema Markup Validator or Google’s Rich Results Test, and remember that “valid” does not mean “shown”.
Our free JSON-LD schema generator can produce FAQPage markup for you to paste into your site.
What to expect
You should not expect expandable FAQ results in Google unless you are an authoritative government or health site. You can expect clearer pages, better answers to buyer questions and content that is easier for search engines and AI tools to understand and quote. That is worth having on its own.
FAQ work is included in our Local SEO, GEO & AEO service, where we write questions for service and location pages and add the matching markup.
FAQ schema: frequently asked questions
What is FAQ schema?
FAQ schema (FAQPage structured data) is code you add to a page to label a list of questions and their answers, so search engines and AI systems can read that Q&A content in a structured, machine-readable way.
Does FAQ schema still show rich results in 2026?
For most sites, no. Google restricted FAQ rich results to well-known, authoritative government and health sites in 2023, so ordinary websites rarely see the expandable FAQ snippet in search any more.
Is FAQ schema still worth adding for SEO?
It usually will not earn a rich result, but it still helps search engines and AI assistants understand your question-and-answer content clearly, which supports answer-engine and generative-search visibility. The larger benefit is almost always the visible Q&A content itself.
How do I add FAQ schema in WordPress?
Use an SEO plugin’s FAQ block (for example Yoast’s FAQ block), a dedicated schema plugin, or add FAQPage JSON-LD by hand. Whichever you choose, make sure every question and answer in the markup also appears visibly on the page.
What is the difference between FAQ schema and HowTo schema?
FAQ schema marks up independent question-and-answer pairs; HowTo schema marks up the ordered steps of a single task. Use FAQ for common questions and HowTo for step-by-step instructions.
Related: SEO, GEO and AEO explained and our SEO & AI-search services.
