FAQ Rich Results Are Gone in 2026 — Here’s What Still Works

If you added FAQ schema hoping for those expandable question boxes in Google, 2026 has bad news — and a clear path forward.

What changed

Google restricted FAQ rich results to a few authoritative health and government sites in August 2023, then removed them entirely on 7 May 2026. HowTo rich results were dropped back in September 2023. The March 2026 core update also stopped showing rich results for schema that isn’t about a page’s primary content.

Translation: the FAQ and HowTo blocks most SEO plugins still push front-and-center no longer earn you anything in search.

What still works in 2026

Plenty. These types remain eligible for rich results: Article, Product, Review, Recipe, Video, Event, JobPosting, Course, Breadcrumb, LocalBusiness and Organization. The winning move is to mark up what your page is actually about, cleanly, and skip the decorative schema.

How SEOPilot handles it

SEOPilot outputs a single consolidated JSON-LD graph for the types Google still rewards, cross-referenced so there are no duplicate entities. It still lets you add FAQ or HowTo schema for other reasons — but labels them honestly as no longer producing rich results, instead of pretending otherwise. That’s the difference between structured data built for today’s Google and structured data built for 2021.