Google dropped FAQ rich results. Structured data still matters — here's why

On 7 May 2026, Google quietly updated its documentation: FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Search for all sites, with the Search Console report and Rich Results Test support removed in June and API support in August. For most commercial sites the expandable FAQ dropdowns had already been gone since 2023 — this just made it final.

Within days, "delete your FAQ schema" advice was circulating. That's the wrong lesson.

What was actually removed

The visual feature in Google's results. Not the schema. Not the content. Google's own note said sites don't need to remove existing FAQ markup. The dropdown is gone; the markup is still valid structured data describing your page.

What structured data does now

Think of JSON-LD as a label on a box. A human doesn't need the label — they open the box. A machine reading thousands of boxes a second relies on it. For a store, three types carry the weight:

Product + Offer — name, price, currency, availability, brand, SKU. This is how a model knows a page is a product and not an article about products. Without it, "do you have X in stock?" is a guess.

Organization / OnlineStore on the home page — who you are, where you ship, how to reach you. This feeds the "is this business real?" judgement that every recommendation implicitly makes.

FAQPage where you genuinely answer questions — shipping times, returns, sizing. No rich result any more, but AI crawlers parse structured data when present, and a clearly marked question–answer pair is the easiest thing for a model to lift into an answer.

What not to do

• Don't stuff FAQ schema on pages that have no FAQ content. That was always spam, and it's now spam with zero upside.
• Don't chase exotic schema types hoping to "unlock" AI Overviews. Google's guide is explicit: there is no special markup for generative AI features.
• Don't remove valid Product markup because a rich result disappeared. Product rich results are still supported, and the data is still read.

Check yours

The NIMSEO check looks for complete Product and Offer JSON-LD on your sampled product pages, with a price that matches the page (A7), and for Organization markup on your home page (G4). On Shopify, Product schema is usually built into the theme. On Salla and Zid, check a product page's source for application/ld+json — if it's missing, it's a theme or app question to raise with the platform.