The practical adaptation is simple to state: stop treating FAQ and HowTo schema as an SEO growth lever for most sites, and keep it only where it serves genuine user experience or accessibility value. In August 2023, Google announced in its own Search Central changelog that it was significantly scaling back FAQ rich result visibility in search results, limiting it to what its announcement called “well-known, authoritative government and health websites,” and made a comparable reduction to HowTo rich results around the same period. This is one of the more precisely documented, dateable policy changes in the structured data space, which means the answer here doesn’t require hedging on the core fact: the SERP-feature payoff for FAQ/HowTo schema is now real but narrow, and outside that named exception category, most sites implementing it today are not getting the rich-result display they may be building toward.
Why this happened and what changed mechanistically
Before the 2023 change, FAQ schema (via the FAQPage type) and HowTo schema were among the more accessible ways for an ordinary content site to gain extra SERP real estate, since the rich result (expandable Q&A blocks or step-by-step visual treatments) required only correctly formatted structured data plus genuinely matching on-page content. That accessibility was itself part of the problem from Google’s perspective: broad eligibility meant a very large number of pages across the web were competing for and displaying this enhanced format, often on content that didn’t warrant the extra prominence, and Google’s own stated rationale for scaling it back centered on refining when these formats provide genuine user value versus cluttering results with low-differentiation Q&A blocks.
The mechanism of the change itself is straightforward: it wasn’t a deprecation of the schema types (FAQPage and HowTo remain valid schema.org types and Google still documents their structured data guidelines for eligible use cases), it was a narrowing of the algorithmic/policy criteria for when Google will actually render the enhanced visual treatment in search results. A page can still carry perfectly valid FAQ or HowTo JSON-LD, pass the Rich Results Test with no errors, and simply never receive the rich result display, because the site doesn’t fall into the retained eligible category.
What sites should actually do now
Stop building new FAQ/HowTo schema as a ranking or SERP-feature strategy unless your site genuinely falls into the government or health authority category Google named. For the overwhelming majority of commercial, informational, or general-interest sites, new implementation effort here is very unlikely to produce the rich-result payoff it once reliably did.
Audit existing FAQ/HowTo schema for actual measurable return before deciding whether to keep it. Search Console’s structured data reports (and the FAQ/HowTo-specific rich result status reports, where still available) will show whether your existing markup is generating any real impressions or clicks attributable to the rich result feature. For most non-exempt sites, the honest expectation post-2023 is that this number will be at or near zero. If that’s what the data shows, the schema is providing no measurable SEO value and is pure maintenance overhead (page weight, markup that needs to stay in sync with content, one more thing that can break or throw validation errors).
Keep the markup only where it earns its place on UX or accessibility grounds independent of rich-result eligibility. FAQPage markup that accurately reflects a genuine, well-organized on-page FAQ section still has legitimate value for users and for assistive technology parsing the page’s structure, even with zero rich-result display. The decision to keep or remove should be separated from the SEO-feature question: if the underlying FAQ or step content is useful to a human reader regardless of how Google displays it, there’s no harm in leaving accurate markup in place. If the FAQ section itself was built primarily as a schema-eligibility vehicle rather than genuine content, this is the moment to reconsider whether it belongs on the page at all.
Don’t assume there’s a hidden path back in. Google’s own announcement named a specific retained category (authoritative government and health sites) without publishing a detailed qualifying rubric beyond that categorical description. There’s no publicly documented checklist of criteria (specific domain types, verification processes, or scoring thresholds) that a site outside that category can work toward to regain eligibility. Treat the exception as a stated policy category, not a target to chase through incremental E-E-A-T improvements or authority-building, since Google hasn’t described it as something sites can qualify into through general site-quality work.
A hypothetical illustration of the audit step. Imagine a hypothetical mid-size software-review site that implemented FAQPage schema across 300 product-comparison pages back in 2022, when the rich result was still broadly available. Running a Search Console audit today might show that impressions attributable to the FAQ rich result have dropped to near zero across the entire set, since the site doesn’t fall into the government or health exemption category, while the markup itself still validates cleanly. In that scenario, the honest conclusion isn’t that something is broken, it’s that the feature the schema was built to earn simply isn’t available to this site category anymore, and continuing to maintain that markup across 300 templates purely for SEO purposes would be effort spent chasing a payoff that no longer exists.
Reallocate the effort. Time previously spent maintaining FAQ/HowTo schema for rich-result purposes is better spent on structured data types with more durable eligibility (Product, Article, Organization, breadcrumb schema, and others that haven’t seen comparable restriction) or on the underlying content quality and technical fundamentals that continue to matter regardless of which specific rich-result formats Google chooses to display in a given year. The 2023 change is a useful reminder that SERP-feature-specific schema investment carries platform risk: Google can and does narrow eligibility for a given rich-result type without warning, and building a strategy heavily dependent on one feature’s continued display is inherently fragile.
