If your site ships FAQ markup, it has been doing nothing since 7 May 2026.

No error appeared. Nothing turned red in Search Console. The rich result simply stopped being shown, and your page kept passing every validator you ran it through.

What Google actually said

Two entries in Google's own documentation changelog, six weeks apart. The first:

Deprecating the FAQ rich result feature

What: Added a deprecation notice to the FAQ rich result documentation.

Why: "This feature will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026."

The second:

Removing documentation for the FAQ rich result feature

What: Removed documentation for the FAQ rich result feature.

Why: "The FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results, as announced in the changelog entry in May 2026."

Read the dates in order. The feature stopped appearing on 7 May. The notice went up on 8 May. The documentation was deleted on 15 June.

That is the whole of the announcement. No blog post, no Search Console message, no email.

The old documentation URL is a redirect now

This is the part you can check yourself in one second. Google's FAQ rich result documentation used to live here:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/faqpage

Try it. It 301s to search/updates#removing-faq-rich-result, which is the changelog entry above.

The same thing happened to HowTo:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/how-to
   -> 301 -> search/updates#how-to-deprecation

A documentation URL that redirects to its own deprecation notice is the clearest possible signal that a feature is finished. If you have that URL bookmarked, or linked from your own site, it now takes your reader somewhere that says the thing they came to learn about no longer exists.

FAQ is also gone from the structured data search gallery, which is the list Google maintains of every rich result it supports.

What "deprecated" means here, and what it does not

Two words get used as if they are the same, and the difference is the whole article.

Deprecated is a notice. The feature still exists in the validator. Your markup is still syntactically correct. Google is telling you it will stop being used.

Removed is the outcome. The feature is not used. It does not appear. It is not coming back.

The FAQ rich result went through both, six weeks apart, and this is the sentence that decides which one you are in:

"The FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results."

Not penalised. Not invalid. Not shown. There is no error for leaving it, and no reward for removing it.

What I measured: 5 of 21 sites still ship it

Nine months of deprecation notices are easy to miss, so I checked whether anyone had.

I fetched the homepage and the /faq path of 21 large sites and searched the HTML for FAQPage, the type that produces the rich result.

still shipping FAQPage      5 of 21
  hubspot.com               /faq
  shopify.com               /faq
  squarespace.com           homepage and /faq
  wix.com                   homepage
  hostinger.com             homepage

shipping none               16 of 21
  mozilla.org  stripe.com  mailchimp.com  wordpress.org  vercel.com
  cloudflare.com  atlassian.com  zapier.com  notion.so  canva.com
  grammarly.com  godaddy.com  namecheap.com  digitalocean.com
  aws.amazon.com  toprast.com

Five months after the feature stopped appearing, a quarter of the sites I checked are still shipping code for it.

To be fair to the negative: a /faq path is not the only place this markup could live, so I went back and probed /help, /faqs and /support on eight of the sixteen that came back clean. All eight came back clean again. The negative is real rather than a wrong-door result, though it is a sample of 21 rather than a survey.

And Google's own ads page still ships it

One more, which I did not expect:

https://ads.google.com/home/     FAQPage    present

Google's own advertising property ships markup for a rich result Google removed in May.

I am not going to pretend that means anything profound. Large sites are assembled by many teams over many years, and Google is not immune to that. But it is the single best argument for why this is worth writing down: if the company that made the change has not finished clearing its own markup, your site has an excuse.

Why nobody noticed

Nothing about this feature fails loudly. That is the design.

A rich result is added by markup and removed by a change on Google's side. Your page is untouched. Your HTML is still valid. The structured data report in Search Console does not go red, because nothing about your markup became invalid. The result just stops being drawn.

If you were watching Search Console for a problem, you were watching for the wrong shape of problem. There is no drop in clicks to explain, because a FAQ rich result never reliably produced clicks. There is no crawl error. There is nothing at all except a feature that used to render and now does not, on a query you would have to have been watching closely to notice.

Is it harmful to leave it?

No. Google says the feature is not shown. It does not say the markup is invalid, and it does not say it hurts you.

So the honest position is: leaving it costs you nothing that Google punishes you for. It costs you three other things.

Maintenance. It is code your next editor has to read, understand and not break, in service of nothing.

Signals. A page carrying structured data for a dead feature invites the next developer to add more of the same. The genre of "structured data we added once" is how you end up with five types and no idea which ones work.

False confidence. The validators still accept it. If your only check is "does this pass", you will keep passing. It is the same shape as robots.txt, which almost everybody believes hides a page from Google.

The tools are still validating it

This is the part that keeps the confusion alive. Search demand for FAQ formatting did not go anywhere:

faq schema  ->  generator | checker | validator | example
faq rich results -> google | example | eligibility 2026 | removal

Every one of those tools will take your markup, check it against the schema, and tell you it is fine. It is fine. It is also for a feature Google stopped showing in May.

A generator producing markup for a removed rich result is not lying to you on purpose. It is just older than the change, and nobody takes a generator offline.

What to do with yours

Three options, in the order I would take them.

1. Keep the markup and change what it is for. The questions and answers on your page are still text, and text is what gets indexed, summarised, and quoted. If the content is good, it does not need the markup to be read. This costs nothing and is what most sites should do.

2. Remove the FAQPage type and leave the content. If the visible question and answer section stays, the page loses nothing. This is the tidy answer, and it is the one I would take on a site I was actively maintaining.

3. Repurpose the types that still work. If the questions on the page are genuinely a course, an event, a product, or a how-to in the sense Google still supports, check whether a live type fits. Do not invent a mapping. Most FAQ sections are just prose with a heading, and prose is fine.

What I would not do is add more of it. If your template generates FAQPage on every page, the cheapest fix is to stop the template from doing that, and leave the pages that already have it alone until you touch them again.

What I did on this site

I checked, and this site ships no FAQPage markup anywhere. So there is nothing here to undo, and I want to be straight about why that is luck rather than discipline: I never added it, because the pages here are not question and answer pages.

What I did do is go and check the one page that could plausibly have it. It does not. And the reason I looked is the reason this article exists: a feature that stops appearing produces no notification, so the only way to know is to check.

While I was in there I found the same shape of problem in AEO and GEO, where Google named two acronyms and then said the work is still SEO, and in the llms.txt file, which Google's own documentation says it ignores. Three separate cases of a company removing something and telling nobody.

The short version

The FAQ rich result stopped appearing in Google Search on 7 May 2026. Google added a deprecation notice on 8 May and deleted the documentation on 15 June. The old documentation URL now redirects to the deprecation notice.

Your markup is not invalid and leaving it does not hurt you. It just does nothing. No error appears anywhere, which is why five of twenty-one large sites, and Google's own ad product page, still ship it.

The questions and answers on your page are still text, and text is what gets indexed. The FAQPage type is what stopped working.

If you want to know whether your site is shipping it, search your HTML for FAQPage. That is a thirty-second check, and it is the only one that would have told you.

Sources

  • Google Search documentation updates, "Deprecating the FAQ rich result feature", 8 May 2026
  • Google Search documentation updates, "Removing documentation for the FAQ rich result feature", 15 June 2026
  • The live redirect from /search/docs/appearance/structured-data/faqpage to /search/updates
  • Google Search's structured data search gallery, checked 13 October 2026
  • Direct requests to the homepage and /faq of 21 domains, 13 October 2026, plus /help, /faqs and /support on eight of them