What actually changed
On 7 May 2026 Google retired FAQ rich results for every site, not just the government and health sites the earlier restriction covered. If you have FAQPage markup, nothing breaks. Nothing penalises you. You simply stop getting the expanded question-and-answer appearance underneath your listing.
The important part is what this reveals about the markup. For a lot of sites, the FAQ section was written because the markup existed, and the questions were chosen because they were the ones that had previously triggered an expanded listing. That is now an empty loop.
Where FAQ structure still does work
Three places, and they are worth separating because the advice differs for each.
Non-Google AI engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude parse Q&A structure well. A question followed by a direct, self-contained answer is the single most extractable shape in a document. This was true before May and it is still true.
Human readers. A FAQ is a summary of the objections a buyer has. If yours is written from real support tickets and real sales conversations, it is doing conversion work — which was always the point, and which was never measured in the SERP.
Your own clarity. Writing the questions forces you to say what the answer is. Most weak FAQ sections are weak because the writer did not want to commit to an answer.
What to do this week
- Leave the markup alone. Removing it is effort spent on nothing. It is not deprecated and it does not hurt.
- Audit the questions. Keep the ones you have heard from a customer. Delete the ones that only exist because they were previously easy to rank for.
- Answer in the first sentence. Not “this is a great question, and there are several considerations.” The answer, then the reasoning.
- Stop treating it as a schema play. It is an objection-handling play with a machine-readable side benefit.
The general lesson
FAQ rich results are the clearest recent example of a pattern worth noticing: a markup feature creates an incentive, the incentive produces content written for the feature rather than the reader, and when the feature is withdrawn the content is revealed as having no other reason to exist.
Google’s own guidance on AI features says the same thing in different words. Write for people, organise for clarity, and the machine-readable benefits follow. The reverse has never held.