Why we stopped adding FAQPage schema.

What changed

In August 2023 Google announced it was reducing FAQ rich results so that they would only show for "well-known, authoritative government and health websites." For everyone else, the expanded FAQ result simply stopped appearing. The markup was still valid, Google still read it, it just no longer produced the visual result that made it worth adding in the first place.

This was not a penalty and it was not a bug. It was Google deciding that the FAQ result had been overused, diluted, and gamed to the point where it was cluttering the results page more than it was helping searchers. They were not wrong about that.

Why that means removing it, not keeping it

The usual reaction is: it does no harm, so leave it. That is almost true, and the "almost" is the point.

FAQPage markup is not free. It is code that ships on every page that carries it, that has to stay valid as the content changes, and that another developer has to understand and maintain. When it was buying you a richer result, that cost was worth paying. Now that it buys nothing for a non-government, non-health site, you are maintaining markup for a benefit that no longer exists. That is not neutral, it is a small, permanent tax on a page for zero return. An SEO audit is usually where this surfaces, alongside the rest of the markup that quietly stopped earning its keep.

There is a second, quieter reason. FAQ sections were very often added because of the schema, not because the page needed them. Once the schema stops paying out, a lot of those FAQ blocks are revealed as what they always were: filler, bolted to the bottom of a page to feed a markup type. Removing the schema is a good moment to ask whether the questions themselves earn their place, or whether they were only ever there to be marked up.

What we do instead

We still write FAQs, on this site and on client sites, because a good question answered plainly is useful to a reader whether or not it produces a rich result. What we do not do is wrap them in FAQPage markup and pretend it is earning something.

The structured data effort goes where it still pays: the Person, Organization and Service entities that build a clear entity graph, BreadcrumbList for the navigation trail, and Article or BlogPosting on content like this. Those still produce results and still help Google understand a site. FAQPage, for most of us, no longer does. The same judgement applies to the rest of a page: on-page work is deciding what earns its place, not adding everything that is technically possible.

The general lesson

SEO advice has a long shelf life on the internet and a short shelf life in reality. The instruction to add FAQPage schema is still repeated in guides, checklists and the plugin defaults written before the 2023 change, and it is still being followed by people who never saw the announcement. Half of technical SEO is noticing when a best practice quietly stopped being one, and being willing to remove the thing everyone else is still adding.