Google deprecated FAQ rich results on May 7, 2026. The question-and-answer dropdowns that expanded SERP listings for years are gone. Search Console reporting follows in June. The API support disappears in August.
That is the first half of the story. The second half is worse for anyone who thought schema markup was their ticket into AI search.
Ahrefs tracked 1,885 web pages that added JSON-LD schema, matched them against control pages that never added schema, and measured citation changes across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT. The conclusion from Ahrefs' director of content marketing: adding schema markup does not help your pages get cited in AI search.
What Google says
Google removed the visible rich result but committed to continuing to use FAQ structured data to understand pages. FAQPage as a Schema.org type remains valid. The markup can stay without causing problems. But the business case for maintaining it just collapsed from both directions.
Tracked by Ahrefs in the largest study of schema's effect on AI citations. Result: no measurable lift.
The pattern you should notice
This follows a familiar cycle. A structured data format gains adoption. SEOs invest heavily. The visible reward disappears once adoption reaches saturation. Google keeps ingesting the markup but stops giving it special treatment in results.
It happened with review stars. It happened with how-to markup. It has now happened with FAQ. The pattern offers less reason to treat any single markup type as a durable strategy.
Why it matters
The removal matters because FAQ rich results were one of the last reliable ways to expand your SERP real estate without paying for ads. Australian businesses that invested time maintaining FAQ schema for SEO visibility now need to redirect that effort.
More importantly, the Ahrefs study kills the narrative that schema is your path into AI Overviews. If your SEO agency is pitching "implement schema and get cited in AI answers," the data does not support that claim for already-visible pages.
What to do about it
Schema is not dead. But it is no longer a lever. It is hygiene.
