FAQ Schema Is Dead? The SEO Test That Shows It Doesn’t Matter

Lots of SEOs say FAQ schema is extremely important. I've had several of them come on my show and say that, but there was a test that was done. FAQ schema was removed from a bunch of product listing pages. And you would expect there to be a drop in organic traffic. This is what this test says. So this test is how does removing FAQ markup on pages with valid schema impact SEO? It reads, "For some time, FAQ schema markup held a valuable place in SEO as Google's inclusion of these snippets under search listings helped these pages enhance visibility and user engagement. So, if you used in the in the past, if you used FAQ schema, your results in Google would look different. Your frequently asked questions, they might show up in the search engine results pages and help you get more clicks. However, as of August 2023, Google has decided to stop displaying FAQ snippets in the search engine results pages for websites unless they are well-known or authoritative, such as government and health sites. This change raises an important question. Does FAQ schema markup still contribute to SEO or could it potentially harm performance? And this is what was changed. We tested the microata FAQ schema on an e-commerce customer's product listing pages by removing the attributes item prop, item scope, and item type from the inline FAQ within the SEO content block. And they show an image where they removed it. The results are removing valid FAQ schema alone had no statistically significant impact on organic traffic. Based on our test, this suggests that since snippets no longer appear in the SER, the FAQ schema does not influence traffic positively or negatively. Though our data does not indicate that removing FAQ schema will lead to increased organic traffic, companies may choose to remove it anyway. As eliminating code makes maintenance easier, primarily when it is implemented via micro data, which is more difficult to QA visually than JSONLD. Other businesses may choose to leave their FAQ markup in place and only remove it in the future when the page type is eventually refactored. Now, to be fair, there is a lot of data left out of this test. It's clearly not super comprehensive, but there is this article on search engine land, the rise and fall of FAQ schema, and what it means for SEO today. And I'm just going to read you the introduction. This was written in 2025, by the way. FAQ schema is no longer a quick SEO win. In August 2023, Google reduced the visibility of FAQ rich results in search, restricting them to authoritative government and health websites. This update effectively rendered the tactic useless for marketers who once relied on it to expand their SER real estate. Google also clarified that FAQ page markup should never be used for advertising or promotional purposes. It belongs only on genuine FAQ pages created to answer user questions. For years, many SEOs, including myself, added structured FAQ data to marketing pages as a best practice. It's time to rethink that habit. And if you believe that it still matters maybe for LLMs. I've heard people say, you know, it matters a lot for LLMs. There's the duck test by Mark William Cook. I've shared this on the podcast before, episode 956 of this show. Do LM actually use schema? The duck test that broke SEO. Such a fun, interesting test. Mark created a page for a fictional company called Ducky T-shirts. He didn't include the address on the page. Instead, he added completely madeup schema code containing the address. When he asked Chat GPT and Perplexity what the company's address was, they returned the address from the schema. The madeup schema. They returned the address from the madeup schema. And this suggests that the AI doesn't actually care about the schema markup itself. Instead, they appear to ignore the schema and just analyze the text within it. It wasn't the schema that mattered. It was the presence of content on the page, even if that text was in some some schema code. So, it wasn't the the schema that mattered. It's just seen as normal text. So, does FAQ schema actually matter? Well, number one, in most cases, it's just not going to be used in the in the search engine results pages. Number two, LLM see schema as normal text. Number three is this experiment and though thin it corroborated it not making a difference. Now some people might make the argument that it could help a page rank in the first place and then once positive click-through rates come in and back links come in it makes less of a difference but it helps you get there in the first place. So this is from Google's page changes to howto and FAQ rich results in Google search central and Google wrote going forward FAQ from FAQ page structure data rich results will only be shown for well-known authoritative government and health websites for all other sites this rich result will no longer be shown regularly sites may automatically be considered for this treatment depending on their eligibility and here's the nail in the coffin. While you can drop this structured data from your site, there's no need to proactively remove it. Structured data that's not being used does not cause problems for search, but also has no visible effects in Google search. And I will leave you with this. If you had a page targeting a keyword, you had that keyword in the page title, page was ranking for the keyword, it's ranking well for the keyword and you did something like you removed that keyword from the page title. The results would be clear on any site, there would be at least some minor difference. So if FAQ schema was so important, there would be at least some minor difference, not no difference at all. All the evidence suggests to it not making any difference. And honestly, it's a good thing because that makes our lives as SEOs a lot easier. That's less meaningless work that we have to do. You want to focus on the stuff that's going to drive the needle. That's relevance. That's authority, not FAQ schema. So, this is episode 1 of my daily search engine optimization podcast, The Edward Show. If you want to see me screen sharing myself doing search engine optimization, that is my 13 and 1/2 hour SEO course, Compact Keywords. It is about finding keywords that have high purchase intent. Keywords where people are looking to pay for something or to use something or to make a discovery call. It's getting amazing testimonials. It is extremely that that course compact keywords is extremely comprehensive. If you haven't checked it out yet, you're going to love it. compact keywords.com. And that's everything that I got for you on today's episode of the show. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow.