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Google spent from May to August 2026 quietly dismantling FAQ rich results — the expandable dropdowns that used to make FAQ pages stand out in search. If you added FAQ schema to your site chasing that dropdown, it's gone. But the reason to keep the schema in place was never really about the dropdown, and the last few months have made that clearer than ever.
Google deprecated FAQ rich results in three phases: the dropdowns stopped appearing in search results on May 7, 2026, Search Console's FAQ reporting was removed in June, and the FAQ rich result endpoint was pulled from the Search Console API this August. FAQPage schema itself is still valid, still recommended by Google, and still gets parsed — the visual perk just went away for everyone except a handful of authoritative government and health sites. The bigger reason to keep using it in 2026 is AI search: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's own AI Overviews all lean on the same structured question-and-answer markup to decide what to quote and cite. Here's what changed, what didn't, and what to actually do about your site's FAQ sections.
Yes — Google removed FAQ rich results from search in three separate phases between May and August 2026. On May 7, the expandable FAQ dropdowns — the accordion-style question-and-answer boxes that used to appear directly under a search listing — stopped rendering for essentially all sites except a small set of authoritative government and health domains. In June, Google pulled FAQ reporting out of Search Console entirely, retiring the rich result status report that used to tell site owners whether their FAQ markup was working. This August, Google finished the rollback by removing the FAQ rich result endpoint from the Search Console API, closing off the last way to check FAQ rich result status programmatically.
The rich-result removal doesn't touch FAQPage schema itself — schema markup and rich results are two different things. Schema markup is the machine-readable code that tells Google (and now, increasingly, AI systems) what a page actually contains — a question, paired with its answer, in a structured format a program can parse without guessing. A rich result is a specific visual treatment Google chooses to build on top of that markup, and Google can turn that visual treatment on or off without touching the underlying data format at all. Google's own Search Central documentation states directly that FAQPage remains a valid, supported schema type, that Google continues to parse FAQ markup to understand pages, and that unused structured data doesn't cause problems for a site's SEO.
Google's Search Central blog framed the change as search-results simplification — part of a broader effort to trim the expandable, space-consuming elements crowding a results page. There's a second, unstated dynamic worth naming: FAQ dropdowns had become one of the most gamed rich result types in SEO, with sites adding generic, low-value FAQ sections purely to earn the extra visual real estate rather than to actually answer a reader's question. Removing the reward removes the incentive to game it — but it does nothing to reduce the value of a page that answers real questions clearly, because that value was never really about the dropdown in the first place.
Yes — the same structured question-and-answer format that used to power a rich result dropdown is exactly the format AI answer engines look for when deciding what to cite. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity all work by pulling short, self-contained passages out of web pages to build an answer, the same mechanism behind the traffic shifts small businesses are seeing from AI Overviews — and a clearly-marked question paired with a clearly-marked answer, in either the visible page content or the FAQPage schema underneath it, is about as easy a passage as a page can offer to extract. Google's own rich-result dropdown was one consumer of that structured data, but it was never the only one, and by 2026 it's arguably not even the most important one.
The shift cuts the opposite direction from how most people are reading this news. Losing the rich result doesn't mean FAQ content stopped mattering for search visibility — it means the audience for that structured markup quietly changed from "Google's dropdown renderer" to "the AI systems increasingly standing between a search and a click." The mechanics of how AI search decides what to cite and what to ignore run on exactly this kind of structured, extractable content — this deprecation is a visible signal of that shift, not a reason to abandon the format that feeds it. That shift matters most for the "how," "what," and "best" queries AI systems have started answering directly instead of sending a click to a website — the exact query types Google's own AI Mode is built to answer without a visit to any site at all, a pattern we've covered in detail elsewhere.
No — leave it in place. There's no SEO penalty for keeping FAQPage markup that no longer produces a rich result, and removing it accomplishes nothing except deleting a structured signal that AI systems can still read. If your FAQ content was written to game the old dropdown — generic questions nobody actually searches, thin one-line answers padded out to look substantial — this is a good moment to rewrite it into something that would actually help a reader or get quoted by an AI system, since the visual reward for the padded version is gone anyway.
If you don't have FAQ schema and have been putting off adding it because Search Console can no longer confirm it's "working" the old way, that's the wrong signal to take from this. The verification path changed; the value didn't. A well-structured FAQ section, marked up correctly, is still one of the more reliably citable formats on a page — it's just being read by a different, and arguably more consequential, audience than it used to be. That's the same audience Google's Search Live feature is increasingly answering local-business questions for without a click ever reaching a website.
FAQ rich results are gone, but the traits that made an FAQ section good were never about the dropdown — losing it just removes the reason to fake one:
Did Google remove FAQ schema markup, or just the rich result? Just the rich result — the visual dropdown. FAQPage structured data is still a valid Schema.org type, Google still parses it to understand page content, and Google has stated that unused structured data causes no harm to a site's SEO.
When did Google remove FAQ rich results from search? In three phases: FAQ dropdowns stopped appearing in search results on May 7, 2026; Search Console's FAQ rich result reporting was removed in June 2026; and the FAQ rich result endpoint was removed from the Search Console API in August 2026.
Should I remove FAQ schema from my website now that the rich result is gone? No. There's no penalty for keeping it, and removing it deletes a structured data signal that AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can still read and cite from, even though Google's own search results no longer render it as a dropdown.
Does FAQ schema still help with SEO in 2026? It no longer earns a rich result dropdown in classic Google search, but it still helps AI systems extract and cite specific answers from a page, which functions as a form of visibility now that AI-generated answers increasingly appear ahead of traditional search listings.
The honest version of this story is that most of the FAQ sections built to chase that old dropdown were never that useful to begin with — they were built for a renderer, not a reader. Losing the renderer just made that obvious. What's actually changed is who's reading the structured version of your content now, and it's a more demanding audience than Google's old dropdown ever was: an AI system deciding whether your page is worth quoting doesn't care that the visual treatment disappeared, it cares whether the answer underneath is actually good.
We build FAQ sections — and the schema underneath them — the same way whether or not there's a dropdown to show for it, because the point was always to be the source that gets quoted, not the box that gets clicked.
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