What is FAQ schema — and why the rich result is gone

FAQ schema is the schema.org vocabulary that pairs a question with its answer, so a machine reading the page can take the pair as data instead of inferring which sentence answers which question. The type is FAQPage, a sub-type of QAPage, and it has been part of schema.org for years.

What changed is not the type. It is what Google does with it — and that story has two dates in it, both of them recent enough that most of the writing about FAQ schema on the web is out of date.

What the markup contains

The shape is small. A FAQPage has a mainEntity array, and each entry is a Question with a name and an acceptedAnswer whose text is the answer:

json
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "mainEntity": [
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "name": "How long does a refund take?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Refunds are issued within 30 days of the charge."
      }
    }
  ]
}

Two rules come with it. The answer in the markup has to be the answer on the page — marking up an answer the reader cannot see is a false statement in a machine-readable form. And a FAQPage is for a page of questions; the QAPage type, which Google still documents, covers the other shape, a page built around a single question with one definitive answer.

The two dates that changed what it is worth

September 14, 2023. Google removed the How-to rich result documentation, writing that the rich result "is no longer shown in search results, on both desktop and mobile devices". The same entry updated the FAQ documentation to state that the feature "is only shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites". If you were reading about FAQ schema in 2023, this is the paragraph that explained the caveat you had skipped.

June 15, 2026. Google removed the FAQ rich result documentation as well. The changelog entry reads: "Removing documentation for the FAQ rich result feature … The FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results, as announced in the changelog entry in May 2026." The documentation URL for FAQ structured data no longer serves a document — it redirects to that entry.

So the type is still valid schema.org, and the markup is still parsed by anything that reads structured data. What is gone is the search feature it used to buy. The sibling type is in a different state: Google's documentation for QAPage — the "Q&A pages" feature, where a page is built around a single question with a definitive answer — is still published.

What the markup is still good for

It makes the question and its answer explicit, in a place a machine can find without reading the page. That is worth something to a crawler and to an answer engine, and it is the same property that makes every other machine-readable surface on this site worth publishing.

The honest limit is worth stating too: no vendor has published a measurement of how often an answer engine quotes a FAQPage block. The markup makes the pair readable; what any given consumer does with a readable pair is its own decision, and nobody has published that number.

What it is not for

It does not buy a rich result — that feature is gone. It does not create content: the answer has to exist on the page before it can be marked up. It is not a ranking lever; it is a labelling. And marking up a question nobody asked is a way of publishing a question and nothing else.

How to decide whether to add it

If you already publish questions and answers as visible content, the markup is a small, honest addition: the same text, labelled. If you do not publish questions, the markup is not a content strategy — it is a way of labelling a page that has no answers, and the file you are about to write is the easy part of a job whose hard part is the writing.

What we do with it here

This site's answer nodes emit FAQPage, and the platform emits it for the question-and-answer sections a site publishes. That is a legibility decision, not a rich-result promise: we are not selling a feature Google has withdrawn, and the pages here say the same thing in the same words.