The honest answer is that there isn’t a verifiable, documented list of surviving edge cases for HowTo rich results outside the categories Google’s 2023 restriction targeted. Google’s August 2023 Search Central announcement scaled back HowTo (alongside FAQ) rich result visibility broadly, and the retained visibility Google has actually described centers on specific narrow categories rather than a general non-recipe, non-DIY exception set. If you’re evaluating whether some other vertical, travel guides, software tutorials, craft instructions, whatever the specific case, still reliably produces prominent HowTo rich results post-restriction, the more accurate framing is that the edge cases are minimal to essentially non-existent for most verticals, rather than that there’s a hidden list of surviving categories a practitioner can target.
Why this needs to be answered this way rather than with a list
This is one of the higher fabrication-risk questions in structured data, precisely because it invites a confident-sounding answer (naming specific “surviving” verticals, offering percentages of how often HowTo still displays in category X versus category Y) that isn’t actually supported by anything Google has published. Google’s 2023 changelog entry describes the scale-back in terms of the change itself and, for FAQ specifically, names an explicit retained category (authoritative government and health sites). For HowTo, Google’s own documentation reflects a comparable reduction in scope without providing an equally granular breakdown of exactly which categories or query types retain reliable visual display. Treating an absence of that granular breakdown as license to invent categories, or to imply a specific vertical (say, home-improvement DIY-adjacent content, or software how-tos) is a reliably surviving exception, would be asserting something Google hasn’t actually stated.
What is genuinely known
What can be said with confidence: prior to the 2023 restriction, HowTo rich results (the step-by-step visual card format) appeared across a fairly broad range of instructional content, not limited to any one vertical. After the restriction, the volume and consistency of that display dropped broadly. Google’s stated rationale, similar to the FAQ change, centered on refining when this format provides genuine incremental user value versus adding SERP clutter across a very large pool of eligible pages. There is no published Google statement carving out specific non-recipe, non-DIY verticals as a preserved exception category the way FAQ’s government/health carve-out was explicitly named.
It’s also true, and worth being honest about, that Google continues to run experiments and test SERP feature display across different query types and verticals on an ongoing basis, which means isolated, query-specific, or temporary instances of HowTo-style visual treatment appearing somewhere outside the core restricted scope aren’t impossible in principle. But “Google sometimes tests SERP features” is a general truth about how Google’s search results evolve, not evidence of a specific, reliable, targetable edge case a practitioner could build a strategy around. Any specific vertical claimed to be a reliable surviving exception, without a citable Google statement or robust, reproducible SERP observation data behind it, should be treated as unverified.
The practical implication
For a site outside the recipe/DIY-adjacent space considering whether to invest in HowTo schema for rich-result purposes, the realistic expectation post-2023 should be set low. Rather than searching for a loophole vertical where the old behavior supposedly persists, the more productive approach is the same as the general FAQ/HowTo guidance: check your own Search Console data for actual measured HowTo-related search appearance and clicks before assuming any category-specific exception applies to you, and don’t build a content or markup strategy premised on a “surviving edge case” that isn’t actually documented anywhere. If your own site’s data genuinely shows meaningful HowTo rich-result display continuing, that’s real, verifiable evidence specific to your case, and worth understanding on its own terms, rather than assuming it reflects a broader, generalizable exception category that other sites in adjacent verticals could also expect to replicate.
The bottom line: no single verifiable list of surviving HowTo edge cases outside the documented restriction exists. The documented change covers most non-exempt content broadly, and any more specific claim beyond that should be treated with real skepticism until backed by either a direct Google statement or your own first-party, reproducible search-appearance data.
