If you’ve been anywhere near LinkedIn in the last 48 hours, you’ll have seen the “hot takes” rolling in. Google deprecated FAQ rich results on 7th May 2026 and apparently this is A Very Big Deal that you need to act on immediately, probably by hiring someone.
It isn’t. It really, really, really isn’t.
Google stopped showing FAQ rich results for the vast majority of websites way back in late 2023.
I know this in particular because I’d just finished writing a 30,000 word document to help small business websites make the most of it in an ethical way, and I was PISSED. Just another reason why SEOs can’t have nice things – we fuck it up for ourselves.
From that point on, the only sites still eligible were well-known, authoritative government and health sites. Not your accountancy firm. Not your recruitment agency. Not your B2B software company. In the UK, the NHS and GOV.UK, basically.
So when the LinkedIn crowd starts screaming that FAQ rich results are dead and you need to do something about it R.I.G.H.T. N.O.W. – what they’re actually telling you is that a feature you lost access to nearly three years ago has now been switched off for the last few sites that still had it. It’s a non-event for most of LinkedIn, and website owners in general.
If you’re not sure whether any of this applies to your website, or you want someone to look at what’s going on with your structured data rather than panic-reading LinkedIn posts, that’s exactly the kind of thing I help with.
Should you remove your FAQ schema?
No. Well – maybe, eventually, if you can be arsed. But you don’t HAVE to, and you certainly don’t need to pay anyone to do it urgently.
Google has been clear that unused structured data doesn’t cause problems. The schema isn’t going to sit there quietly sabotaging your rankings just because the rich result it used to power no longer exists. Google has explicitly said it will continue using FAQ structured data to understand pages, even though the rich result is gone. Structured data and rich results are two different things – always have been.
Cyrus Shepard made this point well on LinkedIn, and he’s right: remove the schema if you want to, leave it if you can’t be bothered. What you absolutely should not do is delete the actual FAQ content from your pages.
The content is the bit that matters
This is where most of the panicked posts are missing the point entirely.
SearchPilot ran an experiment showing a 9.7% increase in organic traffic after adding page-specific FAQ content to footer copy. They also noted that when they removed FAQ schema but kept the content, there was no negative impact on rankings.
The schema was never really the thing doing the work. The content was.
Answering questions that your potential customers are asking – properly, helpfully, without padding it out – is good SEO regardless of whether you wrap it in FAQPage markup or not. That was true before August 2023, it was true after, and it’s still true now.
Why are people making such a fuss?
Partly because some of them genuinely didn’t know that most sites lost access to FAQ rich results nearly three years ago – which tells you something about how closely they were paying attention. Partly because a deprecation notice from Google is a useful hook for content, and fair enough, I’m writing about it too.
But some of it – and I say this with full awareness that I sound like a grumpy old woman shouting at clouds – is because every Google update is an opportunity to manufacture a bit of urgency. Something changed, you might be affected, here’s what we can do for you.
In this case: nothing changed for you. Carry on.
If you have helpful FAQ content on your pages, leave it there. If you don’t have any, think about adding some – not for the schema, just because answering real questions is good for your visitors and good for your SEO. If you have FAQ schema wrapping that content, it can stay or go. It genuinely doesn’t matter.
That’s it. Go and do something more useful with your afternoon.
