Google Removed FAQ Rich Results: Don't Rip Out Your Schema

There is a wave of advice going around right now telling everyone to go delete their FAQ schema because “Google removed it.” Before you open every template and start tearing markup out of your pages, it is worth being precise about what Google actually removed, because the popular reaction is solving a problem that does not exist.

The short version: what went away is the visible SERP feature, the expandable list of questions under a result, and the Search Console reporting attached to it. The markup itself, the FAQPage structured data sitting in your page source, is still a valid Schema.org type and Google has said you can leave it in place. Those are two very different things, and conflating them is how a one-line announcement turns into a weekend of pointless template surgery.

What Google Actually Removed

Here is the part that changed, in plain terms. The rollout has a few separate dates, and lumping them together is part of the confusion:

• The FAQ rich result stopped showing. Those expandable question-and-answer dropdowns under a search result stopped appearing for almost everyone back in May. For most sites they had already been rare for over a year, since Google limited them to well-known, authoritative sources in 2023.
• The Search Console report is going away. The FAQ search-appearance filter, the dedicated FAQ rich result report, and FAQ support inside the Rich Results Test are being removed in June. So the place where you used to track FAQ impressions and validate the markup simply will not be there anymore.
• The Search Console API gets a grace period. If you pull FAQ data programmatically through the API, those calls keep working until August, which gives teams time to adjust dashboards before they break.

That is the entire change. It is a reporting and search-feature deprecation. Notice what is not on that list: nothing about the FAQPage vocabulary being invalid, nothing about it triggering penalties, nothing requiring you to remove anything.

What Google Did Not Remove

This is the part the panic skips over. FAQPage is still a documented, valid type at schema.org, and Google’s own guidance says sites with FAQ structured data do not need to rush to remove it. Google has also said for years that unused structured data does not cause problems for Search. Markup that no longer powers a rich result just sits there quietly. It does not hurt you.

There are also good reasons to keep it. Bing and other search engines may still process FAQ markup for their own features, and they did not all follow Google out the door. More importantly, structured questions and answers are exactly the compact, factual blocks that AI search engines like to pull from. A clean FAQPage block is a machine-readable summary of “here are real questions and here are the direct answers,” and that is useful to a system trying to quote your page whether or not Google paints a dropdown around it.

So the markup lost its most visible payoff in classic search, but the underlying reason to mark up a genuine question-and-answer section, making the meaning explicit for machines, did not go anywhere.

The Contrarian Bit: Deleting It Is the Risky Move

Here is where the common advice gets it backwards. The instinct is “the feature is gone, so clean up the markup.” But removing schema from every page across a CMS is a bulk edit, and bulk edits are exactly where sites quietly break things: a botched template change that strips Article schema too, a regex that eats a closing brace, a deploy that ships invalid JSON-LD sitewide. You would be taking on real risk to remove something that, by Google’s own statement, costs you nothing to leave alone.

The honest cost-benefit is lopsided. Keeping valid FAQ markup: zero downside, possible upside in Bing and AI engines. Mass-deleting it: engineering time, deploy risk, and a non-zero chance of collateral damage to schema you actually want. “Do nothing” is the rare case where it is also the correct technical decision.

The one situation where you should touch it is different and more important than cleanup. If you ever added FAQPage schema to pages that do not really have a visible question-and-answer section, or where the answers in the markup are teasers rather than the real, on-page answers, that was a guidelines violation when you did it and it still is. The disappearance of the rich result does not retroactively make it fine. Fix those, not because the feature left, but because faking structured data has always been the thing that earns manual actions.

What To Actually Do

A practical checklist, in order of priority:

1. Leave valid FAQ markup in place. If the questions and answers are genuinely on the page, do nothing. This is the answer for most sites.
2. Stop relying on the FAQ report. Move any monitoring you had off the soon-to-vanish Search Console report now, and update API calls before the August cutoff so dashboards do not throw errors.
3. Audit for fake FAQ schema. Crawl your own site and flag pages carrying FAQPage markup where the visible content is not actually a Q&A. That is the only markup worth removing, and it was a liability before this change.
4. Reframe the FAQ content itself. Make sure the questions answer real user intent in clear, self-contained blocks. That is what gets quoted by AI engines, and it is independent of any rich result.
5. Keep your other schema honest. The same rule that applies here applies everywhere: dateModified should be real, markup should match the page. Our schema markup guide covers the types most sites actually need and how to validate them.

If you want to find the pages still carrying stale or mismatched markup, a crawl is the fastest way to surface them. Pointing a crawler at your site and pulling every page’s structured data into one view turns “do we have fake FAQ schema anywhere?” from a vague worry into a finite list you can clear in an afternoon.

The Bottom Line

Google removed a search feature and the report behind it. It did not remove FAQ schema, it did not deprecate the vocabulary, and it explicitly said you can keep what you have. The crowd telling you to delete everything is reacting to a headline, not the guidance underneath it.

Keep valid markup, kill any fake markup you find, move your reporting off the dying report, and spend the time you saved on something that actually moves the needle, like making sure your content is the kind a search engine or an AI assistant wants to cite in the first place. The FAQ dropdown was always a nice-to-have. The clarity it represented is still worth keeping.