FAQ Schema: Still Worth It After the Rich Result Change

Published 2026-08-23 · 6 min read · by the isaeo team

What Google changed

FAQ rich results — the expandable questions under a search listing — were scaled back to a small set of authoritative government and health sites. For almost everyone else, adding FAQPage markup no longer produces that visual treatment.

A lot of people concluded FAQ schema was dead. That conclusion mistakes one consumer of the markup for all of them.

Why it still matters

Rich results were a display feature. The markup's real job is semantic: it states unambiguously that this page contains a set of questions with matched answers.

For an answer engine, that's the highest-value structure on the web. It doesn't have to infer where the question ends and the answer begins — the markup says so. In this product's AEO scoring, FAQ or Q&A schema is worth 20 of 100 points, the largest single award of any signal, ahead of having any structured data at all (20) only in the sense that they stack.

Compare the alternatives: question-shaped headings earn 12 because they're inferred; explicit FAQ markup earns 20 because it isn't.

Writing FAQs worth marking up

The markup is trivial. The content is where it goes wrong.

• Use real questions. Support tickets, sales call objections, search console queries. Not questions invented to hold keywords.
• Answer in 40–60 words. Long enough to be complete, short enough to quote whole.
• Make each answer self-contained. No "as mentioned above".
• Answer honestly, including when the answer is no. "Does it work offline? No — it needs a connection because…" is more citable than an evasion.
• Three to six per page. Twenty questions is a knowledge base, not an FAQ.

The markup

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "mainEntity": [{
    "@type": "Question",
    "name": "How long should a title tag be?",
    "acceptedAnswer": {
      "@type": "Answer",
      "text": "Around 50-60 characters. Google truncates on pixel width near 600px, so wide capitals truncate sooner than narrow lowercase."
    }
  }]
}

JSON-LD in a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag. There's no need for microdata attributes scattered through your HTML.

Mistakes that invalidate it

1. Markup that doesn't match visible text. The questions and answers must appear on the page for a human. Invisible FAQ markup is a spam signal and can earn a manual action.
2. FAQPage on a page that isn't an FAQ. Marking up two tangential questions on a product page to game the schema is exactly what got rich results restricted.
3. Using FAQPage for a single question. That's QAPage, and only when users can answer too.
4. HTML inside the answer text beyond the small set of permitted tags.
5. Leaving it unvalidated. One malformed JSON block and engines discard the whole thing silently.

Every post on this blog carries FAQ markup generated from a visible Q&A block at the bottom — the pattern being described, applied.