· Practical intelligence from COR SolutionsThe expandable question-and-answer dropdowns are gone from Google for every site. Stripping out your FAQ schema is the wrong response, and the reason why says something bigger about where search is going.
Google has finished switching off FAQ rich results. The expandable question-and-answer dropdowns that used to appear under some search results are gone, for every site, as of this year. If your instinct is to strip out all your FAQ schema, hold on. It is the wrong move, and the reason why says something bigger about where search is going.
The headline sounds dramatic, but for most businesses nothing changes in the results today. Google quietly restricted FAQ rich results to well-known government and health sites back in September 2023. Everyone else lost them then. Plenty of SEO teams kept adding FAQ markup anyway, out of habit. This latest change just formalises what has been true for nearly three years. It is a documentation update, not an algorithm change, and rankings are not affected.
FAQ is not alone. HowTo rich results were wound down and finished in 2025. Google has retired a run of structured-data result types over the last couple of years. The pattern is obvious once you see it: the visible search features that schema used to buy you are being trimmed, steadily. Betting your structured-data strategy on winning one of them is a losing bet.
Here is the part that matters. Structured data was always doing two jobs. One was cosmetic: earn a rich result, a star rating, a dropdown, a set of sitelinks. The other was quiet and structural: tell a machine, clearly and unambiguously, what the content on the page actually is.
The cosmetic job is shrinking. The structural job is growing fast, because of who is now reading your markup: AI search.
We spend a lot of time watching what AI search engines actually do. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity to recommend a business, those tools run real searches, read real pages, and cite specific sources. We capture that, and one pattern comes up again and again: businesses with clean, complete Organisation and LocalBusiness schema get referenced more often than otherwise-identical businesses without it. Google has not confirmed a direct link and we are careful not to overstate it, but the correlation is consistent and it lines up with how these models parse content.
So the FAQ dropdown is gone, but the FAQ markup can still help a machine understand that your page answers a real question. That is worth something in a world where an AI answer, not a blue link, is increasingly what a customer sees first.
No. There is almost nothing to gain from deleting it. Removing the markup will not lift your rankings, it will not bring back the rich result, and it strips out structured information that could still earn you a place in an AI-generated answer. If your FAQ markup honestly reflects the content on the page and follows Google's guidelines, leave it where it is.
The one thing to avoid is the opposite mistake: bolting FAQ sections onto pages purely to have some schema. Use it where a genuine question-and-answer format helps the reader. That has always been the right approach, and it still is.
This is not a new playbook, it is a reminder of an old one. Stop chasing individual search features, because they appear and disappear on Google's schedule, not yours. Build clear, well-structured content that both a person and a machine can read easily, and you are covered whichever direction search moves next. Right now that direction is AI, and structured data is one of the simplest ways to stay legible to it.
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