Stop shipping schema that no longer renders

FAQ and HowTo rich results are dead, so stop shipping them.

What to do: Keep Product, Article, Breadcrumb, Review, and Video schema. Stop adding FAQPage and HowTo markup expecting a rich result, and ignore any 2025 playbook still selling it as an AI trick.

Why it works: Those results are gone, so the effort is pure waste dressed up as best practice.

Example: Google removed HowTo rich results and restricted FAQ results to government and health sites back in 2023. The tactic has been dead for two years and half the internet still recommends it.

Walk it through

I checked Google's own record, then ran a real practitioner query through Perplexity in July 2026. Here is exactly what came back.

1. Read the update Google actually shipped, in Google's own words.

Open developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes directly.

This is not a rumor or a third-party interpretation. It is Google's own post, still live, and it says exactly what the card above claims. The update box reads: "As of September 13, Google Search no longer shows How-to rich results on desktop, which means this result type is now deprecated." A few lines down: "FAQ rich results will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown regularly." That is not a nuance. That is Google telling you directly to stop.

2. Ask a real practitioner question and read what the model gives back.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search?q=should I still add faq schema to my website

Perplexity's answer to "should I still add faq schema to my website" opens with "Short answer: Yes, but only if you actually have genuine FAQ content on the page," then walks through what to consider and best practices, closing with a 10 sources counter

The answer opens with "Short answer: Yes, but only if you actually have genuine FAQ content on the page. FAQ schema is valuable for pages that answer real questions your audience asks." It runs through what to consider, best practices, even tells you to "validate your markup with Google's Rich Results Test." Ten sources back this answer. Nowhere in it does the model say what Google's own blog says in step one: that this rich result is gone for every site except government and health. The synthesized answer is reasonable-sounding, generic SEO advice. It is not the same as the primary source.

3. Open the sources behind that answer and see who is still selling the old advice.

Perplexity's Links tab for the same query lists ten SEO blogs, including Search Engine Land's accurate "Once an SEO win, FAQ schema is now limited to government and health sites" alongside Epic Notion's "FAQ Schema in 2026: Still a Valuable SEO Asset," a live contradiction in the current index

Ten domains, and they do not agree with each other. Search Engine Land has it right: "Once an SEO win, FAQ schema is now limited to government and health sites. Here's how to keep your FAQs visible in search and AI." Two rows down, Epic Notion is still selling the opposite: "FAQ Schema in 2026: Still a Valuable SEO Asset... Learn why FAQ schema remains a powerful SEO tool this year despite Google's changes." A Reddit thread further down asks the exact question people are stuck on: "Is there still good reason to use faq schemas today?" The card's line about half the internet still recommending a dead tactic is not a guess. It is sitting in the live source list for this exact query.

The read

Google already told you, in writing, two years ago. The 2023 post is not buried or ambiguous. It names the exact restriction: government and health sites only.
The advice ecosystem has not caught up. Blogs dated 2026 are still telling readers FAQ schema is a live win. Age of the post is not a proxy for accuracy here.
The AI answer inherits the muddle, it does not resolve it. Perplexity's synthesis hedges toward "yes, with caveats" because that is what most of its sources say. The model reflects the average opinion of what has been written, not an audit of Google's actual policy.

Steal it

Run this on your own site before you touch anyone else's advice. Pull up your FAQ and how-to pages and view source, or run them through Google's Rich Results Test, and look for FAQPage or HowTo in the JSON-LD. If you find it and you are not a government or health site, you are maintaining markup for a rich result that cannot show up. That is engineering and content time spent on a result nobody sees.

Defend the ground that still matters instead. Product, Article, Breadcrumb, Review, and Video schema still render, still get picked up, and are worth the same rigor you were putting into FAQ and HowTo. If your CMS or an old SEO plugin is auto-injecting FAQPage or HowTo on every page template, that is worth ripping out on principle, not because it is actively harmful, but because it is a line item that should be zero and is not.

Gotchas

You do not have to remove what is already there. Google says it plainly: dropping the structured data is fine, but "structured data that's not being used does not cause problems for Search, but also has no visible effects." Do not burn a sprint ripping out old markup. Just stop adding more of it.
If you ask an AI answer engine for a second opinion, you may get the wrong one. The Perplexity run above is proof. Check the primary source, not the synthesized summary, before you decide what to ship.
Honest caution: the government and health exception is real but narrow. If you are not one of those two categories, it is not a loophole you can argue your way into. Google's own language draws the line at "well-known, authoritative" sites in those two sectors, not adjacent ones.