Google has noted that FAQ Schema is no longer appearing in search results.
I just investigated this after reading a post by SEO Lily Ray over on LinkedIn.
What is SchemaMarkup?
Schema markup is machine-readable code that we place in web pages to help inform the search engines of the meaning of that page.
Historically, search engine crawlers scrape website content and can read what a page says but not what it means. This reinforces the concept of the semantic web that Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed back in 2001. His idea was that the web shift from documents that people just read to a place where those same documents are data that machines can understand.
Schema code has a strict vocabulary and a number of different types, each serving a different purpose
For example, Schema can indicate your business details on your “about” page or your professional details on a profile page, It’s a “belt and braces” way of being crystal clear on what any web page is about, what it means.
Additionally, this reinforces the concept of entities, which are the people, places, things, and concepts fundamental to natural language processing (NLP). In turn NLP is the process used to read and understand bodies of text as per that used to train the Large Language Models that underpin AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude etc. NLP models like BERT were prominently announced as powering Google Search, the predecessors to the generative LLMs that now underpin tools like ChatGPT and Claude
The Practicalities of Schema
When I was consulted for the SEO on a prestigious care home group’s website development a couple of years ago, the business was keen to publish its open job opportunities.
To assist in the visibility of these roles, I added Schema markup to each job page in a format that clearly labelled the page as a job description. Humans could see that, search engines can crawl the body copy of the JD, but the added value is that the Schema ensures that machines can clarify and understand.
The result? When you look for jobs in search, Google tends to show those roles in a particular format. Some job boards scrape those JDs from Schema. So we were giving every job opening every chance to be understood and shared more widely.
And FAQ Schema?
It does what it says on the tin. Got a page where you provide solid answers to valid questions? Label those pages for the machines so that they know for certain that’s exactly what your web page is about.
The result? When users type questions into Google Search, you’ve primed your pages to provide the answers to those questions. Your answer should be the result.
However, there is a catch. A couple of years ago Google devalued FAQ schema for everything but government or medical websites.
And now? As of May 7th, FAQ Schema is no longer of any use for any websites in search.
But there is one more however…
FAQ Schema for AI
I’ve been adding Schema markup to assist clients’ webpages within AI Search. It’s a solid SEO strategy anyway and has been for years. But now that we’re all looking to try and increase AI visibility, every little helps.
And so Schema, these rich snippets, is supposedly being used by AI too. So what’s good for SEO is good for GEO too, right?
Except for the fact that Google now says “Computer Says No“. Google’s position on rich results doesn’t speak for all machines reading your content, so just because Google says no, doesn’t mean every other service does.
My Take on FAQ Schema
Personally, I believe its best practice to label your webpages with schema, no matter what type of content you offer. Just because Google says it’s not using FAQ schema in search results, it doesn’t mean that there’s no benefit. It’s just no longer the same benefit.
Structured data, another name for schema markup, helps LLMs parse page content more reliably during training and retrieval. And that is the key benefit for forward-looking website owners who need not just their human traffic but for the machines reading our webpages to understand them too.
And besides that, Google is not the only method of search. It has enjoyed dominance for decades, bringing in historically around 90–92% of all organic queries, but that could erode as AI search supplements traditional search.
If you need a chat about getting greater visibility in AI search, more clicks, and implementing schema and any other techniques that your web designer or previous agency may have forgotten, leave me a message on my contact form and I’ll get back to you.