An FAQ section is a block of questions and answers published inside a page to clear up the recurring doubts of whoever is reading it. Until 7 May 2026 it also had a second job: with FAQPage markup those questions appeared under the search result, in an accordion that widened the space the site took up on Google's results page. Since that date the rich result is no longer shown to anyone, and on 15 June Google also removed the documentation that described it.
Much of what ranks for "faq seo" has not caught up. In the Italian top ten, four results still explain how to add the schema to get rich snippets and none mentions 7 May 2026. The UK top ten, which we read on 26 September 2026, is more mixed: Shopify's guide, updated in May 2026, already treats FAQ schema as a low priority and shortlist.io opens by saying Google removed the rich result, but the page still includes a guide from 2022 and several posts from 2025 written before the change. Anyone following the older advice today is working for a feature that no longer exists. FAQs remain one of the most useful things you can put on a page, but for a different reason from the one you will find on page one.
The three dates that changed FAQs
The end did not come suddenly. It came in three steps spread over almost three years.
| Date | What Google did | Who was affected |
|---|---|---|
| 8 August 2023 | Retires HowTo rich results and limits FAQ ones to "well-known, authoritative government and health websites" | Every site outside health and government |
| 7 May 2026 | The FAQ rich result stops appearing in Search | The remaining government and health sites as well |
| 15 June 2026 | Removes the feature's documentation, the Search Console report and support in the Rich Results Test | Anyone monitoring FAQs as a SERP feature |
The wording Google used in the changelog is dry: "FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search", as reported by Search Engine Journal on 10 May 2026. No request to remove the markup, no announced penalty. What it used to generate is simply no longer drawn. The change was noticed: UK searches for "faq rich results" went from 10 in April 2026 to 260 in May, then fell back to 10 by August (DataForSEO, Google UK, September 2026).
Eight questions on Google UK: what has replaced the accordion
On 26 September 2026 we queried Google UK on desktop with eight queries phrased as questions, taken from different sectors, and noted which features appear above the organic results.
| Query | AI Overview | "People also ask" block | Sources cited in the AI Overview |
|---|---|---|---|
| faq seo | Yes | Yes | n/a |
| how much does a website cost | Yes | Yes | 7 |
| how to choose an seo agency | Yes | Yes | n/a |
| what is the difference between seo and sem | Yes | Yes | 6 |
| why is my website not showing on google | No | Yes | none |
| how to calculate roi | Yes | Yes | 7 |
| how much do solar panels cost | No | Yes | none |
| how much does a heat pump cost | Yes | Yes | n/a |
Six queries out of eight open with an AI Overview, eight out of eight show the "People also ask" block. Both surfaces are built on the question-and-answer pair, exactly the shape FAQ markup was there to declare. On "how much does a website cost", one of the seven sources cited by the AI Overview is the FAQ section of a web agency's pricing guide: the cited text begins "Costs FAQ Q. How much does a website cost per month?". The same AI Overview closes by putting two questions back to the user, what the website is for and whether they plan to build it themselves or hire someone: the conversation continues inside Google, not on your site. And where there is no AI Overview, as on "why is my website not showing on google", the first result is Google's own help page, itself written as a question with its answer.
If you want to understand the mechanism that decides which pages end up in there, the full picture is in our guide to AI Overviews ranking factors.
Why the question-and-answer format still holds up
The most useful data on this comes from the Pew Research Center, which in March 2025 tracked the real browsing of 900 US adults across 68,879 Google searches. A US sample, so not directly transferable to the UK, but the structure of the effect is the same: 60% of searches starting with a question word (who, what, when, why) produced an AI-generated summary. And where that summary appeared, clicks on traditional results fell to 8% of visits, against 15% on pages without one.
We have not found an independent UK study with a published methodology on how often AI Overviews appear. For Italy, where Visilay is based, there are two and they do not agree, which says something about how quickly the ground is moving. Trovato Agency, on 2,976 Italian keywords checked between October and November 2025, found an AI Overview on 22.7% of queries, peaking at 32.5% on informational ones. SEOZoom, in December 2025 and on a sample of over 30 million keywords, reached 54.15%. Two methodologies and two keyword sets: what both confirm is that the share of results pages with a generated answer above the results is no longer a niche case, and in the SEOZoom sample 40% of the links shown in the AI Overview came from URLs outside the organic top 10.
In practice: the question you answer in 300 characters can take you to a place your page would not have reached on rankings alone. It is the same ground we cover in answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation.
Where the right questions come from
Almost all of the difference between an FAQ section that brings something in and one that just takes up space lies here. The sources we use, in order of yield:
- Sales emails and phone calls. These are the only questions you can be certain someone really asked, in the words they used to ask them.
- Google Search Console, filtering queries that start with how, how much, when, why, what. It tells you which questions the site is already visible for without ever having addressed them directly.
- The "People also ask" block and related searches, which in our 26 September check appeared on eight queries out of eight.
- The site's internal search, if you have one and log it.
- Keyword research tools, to put an order of magnitude on volume and see whether a question deserves a paragraph or a whole page.
The exclusion rule matters as much as the inclusion rule: if you have never heard a question from a customer and it does not appear in Search Console, it is most likely not a question, it is a subheading in disguise.
An example from our own work: on the project with Macropix, a Milan-based LED screen manufacturer, one of the pages that moved results explained what the price of an LED wall depends on, the question the sales team heard at every first contact. On one of the category keywords the site went from position 88 to 2, and in July 2026 the domain holds a 25.55% share of voice on the cluster, ahead of amazon.it at 18.08% (source: Semrush). The full story is in the article on SEO for manufacturing.
How to write an answer that gets picked up
We counted how ours are built. Of the 237 articles published on the Visilay blog, 59 have an FAQ section, for a total of 302 questions: 5.1 per article, with answers averaging 334 characters, the shortest 80 and the longest 515. It is not a universal rule, it is the measure we have set ourselves and it works with the way these blocks are read.
The three things that make the difference when writing:
- The answer in the first sentence. Yes, no, a number, a date. Context comes after. An answer that starts with "it depends on many factors" cannot be extracted by anyone, neither a reader in a hurry nor a model.
- One verifiable element per answer. A figure, a date, the name of whoever measured it. That is what separates an FAQ from a paraphrase of the page.
- The question written the way the customer says it. "How much does it cost" beats "Implementation cost analysis", and it matches the way people type and speak.
For the rest of the page structure, the same rules apply that we follow when writing SEO content.
Where to put them, and when a question deserves its own page
Three placements, with three different purposes. At the end of an article, to settle the doubts the piece left open. Inside a service or product page, next to the objection that stops the signature (price, timescales, risks, what happens if it does not work). On a dedicated FAQ page, which makes sense mainly as a support tool for existing customers.
One point that EG Creative Content, second in the UK results for "faq seo", put well in March 2026: you do not need to limit yourself to blocks labelled FAQ. A question can be an H2 in the body of the article with the direct answer underneath, and it works the same way.
When a question has a results page all of its own, with dedicated results and its own volume, the right place for it is an article, not a line at the bottom of a page. It is a question of search intent: if the searcher expects a guide, three lines in an accordion will not replace it. The opposite mistake, repeating the same FAQ on forty pages, only produces pages competing for the same query.
Should FAQPage markup be removed?
No, and it is not worth adding it in the hope of a comeback either. The FAQPage type remains valid in the Schema.org vocabulary, where it is used on between one and ten million domains according to aggregates from the Google index in July 2026. Google stopped drawing the rich result, it did not ask anyone to remove the code.
On whether structured data helps you get cited by generative systems, the numbers exist and they are not encouraging. Ahrefs, on 11 May 2026, followed 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD between August 2025 and March 2026, comparing them with 4,000 control pages: +2.4% citations on Google AI Mode and +2.2% on ChatGPT, neither change statistically significant, and a 4.6% drop on AI Overviews. Google's documentation on AI features is just as clear: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features".
Shopify too, in its guide updated in May 2026, says that for most online shops FAQ schema is no longer a priority. What still holds true about structured data in general, and about the types that still generate rich results, is collected in our guide to schema markup.
The mistakes we correct most often
- Questions written for the markup. "What is our service X?" at the bottom of the service X page. Nobody types it, nobody reads it.
- Answers that redirect. "Contact us to find out more" is not an answer, it is a form in disguise. If you have the number, write it.
- Identical FAQs across the whole site. Copying the same block onto every page competes with yourself and adds no information.
- Answers that repeat the body of the page. If the FAQ says what is already three paragraphs up, the right place for that sentence was three paragraphs up.
- Thirty questions to look thorough. Better five that you answer better than anyone else. Ours average 5.1 per article, and that is no accident.
How to tell if they are working
The report that measured the rich result disappeared along with it, so the check goes back to Search Console: filter queries by question word and look at impressions and average position before clicks. Clicks alone tell an ever smaller part of the story, for the reasons behind zero-click searches. The second check is cruder and more useful: open the results page for your main query, read the four questions in the "People also ask" block and check whether your page answers those or others you made up. To monitor citations in AI Overviews and in ChatGPT answers you need dedicated tools, and we set out the criteria for choosing them in the article on how to rank on answer engines.
An FAQ section is a sales document
There is a paradox in what happened on 7 May. For years FAQs were written for Google, and Google stopped showing them just as they were becoming the format its generated answers read best. The result is that today an FAQ section pays off when it is done badly from an SEO point of view and well from a sales point of view: awkward questions, prices, limits, cases where the service is not a good fit. Businesses willing to answer "how much does it cost" and "what happens if it doesn't work" in writing win twice, with the people who read and with the systems that cite. If you want to understand which questions your market is putting to search engines and generated answers, it is the work we do in our SEO and AI projects and in our SEO work.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, but no longer to get the accordion in the results: that rich result has not been shown since 7 May 2026. They help you capture the questions Google builds AI Overviews and the People also ask block on. In our check of 26 September 2026 on Google UK, 6 question queries out of 8 opened with an AI Overview and 8 out of 8 had a People also ask block.
No. Google withdrew the feature, it did not ask anyone to remove the code, and the FAQPage type remains valid in the Schema.org vocabulary, where it is used on one to ten million domains according to aggregates from the Google index in July 2026. Leaving it causes no problems; adding it today in the hope of a rich result achieves nothing.
Few, and real ones. Of the 237 articles on the Visilay blog, the 59 with an FAQ section have 5.1 questions on average, with answers averaging 334 characters. The criterion is not the number: a question goes in if someone has actually asked it, by email, on the phone or as a query recorded in Google Search Console.
It depends on the purpose. A dedicated FAQ page works as support for existing customers. For search visibility, questions placed where the doubt arises perform better: at the end of the article that raised them, or on the service page next to the objection that stops the signature. If a question has a results page of its own, it deserves its own article.
The format helps, the markup does not. The Ahrefs study of 11 May 2026 on 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD measured +2.4% citations on AI Mode and +2.2% on ChatGPT, changes that are not statistically significant, and a 4.6% drop on AI Overviews. Google says no special markup is needed to appear in its AI features.
