SEO
Do FAQ rich results still work?
Not for most sites. Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites in 2023 and has not reversed it. The markup is still worth shipping, because Q&A pairs are the cleanest extractable format for AI answer engines.
What changed and what did not
The visual enhancement went away for ordinary businesses. The markup remains valid, is still parsed, and still communicates structure — which matters more now that answer engines are a meaningful traffic source.
The requirement that is not optional
Questions and answers must be visible on the page. Marking up content a user cannot see is a policy violation, and it happens easily when FAQ data outgrows the template that renders it.
Where to use it
On pages with genuine buyer questions — service pages, product pages, a dedicated FAQ. Not reflexively on every page, and never with questions invented to justify the markup.
Which rich results still exist
| Type | Status |
|---|---|
| Product with price and availability | Active, and valuable for retail |
| Breadcrumbs | Active, and cheap to implement |
| Review stars | Active for eligible types, and heavily policed |
| FAQ | Restricted to government and health sites since 2023 |
| HowTo | Retired from desktop and mobile results |
| Sitelinks searchbox | Retired |
The longer version
This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, Answer Engine Optimization: writing the passage that gets quoted covers it in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who answered this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.