In August 2023 Google restricted FAQ rich results to "well-known, authoritative government and health websites". Overnight, the expanded question accordions vanished from most results.
The reasonable question: is FAQPage markup still worth adding? Yes, for a different reason than before.
Why it was removed
FAQ rich results were abused into uselessness. Once everyone learned they doubled the vertical space a result occupied, every page grew an FAQ - usually questions nobody asked, answered in a sentence, added purely for the SERP real estate.
The result was worse for searchers, so Google restricted it to categories where authoritative FAQs have genuine value. The markup is still parsed. It just no longer changes how the blue link renders for most sites.
Why it still earns its place
AI answer engines parse it directly. When an assistant answers "how long should a title tag be", it needs a question-answer pair. FAQPage JSON-LD hands it exactly that structure with no inference required. Prose has to be interpreted; structured data does not.
It is unambiguous. A model reading your page has to decide which sentence answers which implicit question. Marked-up FAQ removes the guesswork.
Google still uses it for understanding. Not for display, but structured data continues to feed how content is understood and matched to queries.
It costs nothing. The content is already on the page. The markup is thirty lines of JSON.
Free toolFAQ Schema GeneratorTurn a list of questions and answers into valid FAQPage JSON-LD, the structured data AI answer engines quote most readily.Writing questions worth marking up
The failure mode is inventing questions to have something to mark up. That produces a padded page and helps nothing.
Use questions people actually ask. Sources: your support inbox, the "People also ask" box for your target query, and the questions in your sales calls. If nobody has asked it, do not answer it.
Answer in the first sentence. An answer that opens with "It depends on several factors" will never be quoted. Lead with the answer, then qualify it.
How long should a meta description be? Between 120 and 160 characters. Under 120 wastes space; over 160 truncates mid-sentence.
That gets quoted. "There is no single ideal length, as it depends on your industry and audience" does not.
Four to six questions. Enough to cover the real ambiguity, few enough that each one earns its place.
Include a number, a unit or a specific where you can. Checkable specifics are what a model can attribute; vague generalities are not.
The rule that matters
Every marked-up question and answer must be visible on the page.
This is the one that carries a penalty. Marking up content that only exists in JSON-LD - or that requires JavaScript to appear - risks a structured data manual action, which is manual to fix and takes weeks to lift.
An accordion is fine, as long as the text is in the DOM on load. A tab panel is fine. A modal that fetches content on click is not.
Where it goes
Anywhere in the document. Head or body both work; keeping it in the head next to your other JSON-LD is easier to maintain.
One FAQPage block per page. If you have several FAQ sections, combine them into one mainEntity array rather than emitting multiple blocks - duplicated types on one page are a common validation warning.
Judge your FAQ by whether a person reading it gets a straight answer. If it reads like it was written for a crawler, it will not get quoted by an AI engine either - they are optimising for the same thing now.
Launch it where the numbers are checked
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