When FAQ schema still earns rich results
Google reduced FAQ rich-result display in 2023 to mainly authoritative government and health sites, then partially reopened the surface in 2025 for high-quality non-government content. As of April 2026, FAQ rich results display intermittently for non-government sites — most visibly when the FAQ is on a clearly informational page, the questions are unique to the page, and the answers are substantive (not one-line filler).
Practical rule: add FAQ schema where it's editorially honest. Skip it on commercial landing pages where the 'FAQ' is really sales copy in question form. Google's spam team flags fake-FAQ patterns and suppresses rich results on those domains.
Why FAQ schema still helps even without rich results
AI retrievers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AIO) actively use FAQPage schema as an extraction signal — not to display rich results, but to identify clean answer passages. Pages with honest FAQ schema get cited disproportionately for the questions they answer.
In our engagements, adding well-scoped FAQ schema (3–6 questions per page, each answer 40–80 words, no duplication across pages) lifts AI-citation share on the underlying queries by a measurable amount over a 4–8 week window.
How to scope FAQ schema correctly
Pick questions a real user would type, not questions you wish they would ask. Make the answers self-contained — the user should not need to read the surrounding page to understand the answer. Keep questions distinct across pages: the same question on multiple URLs creates duplication problems for both Google and LLM retrievers.
Match the schema to what's visible on the page. Hidden, accordion-collapsed, or JavaScript-rendered FAQs that aren't in the rendered HTML are inconsistent with FAQPage schema and risk a manual action under Google's structured-data guidelines.