FAQ structured data on product pages: does it still help?

An SEO audit for your Magento shop comes back with a list of recommendations, and one of them says: add FAQ schema to product pages to win rich results. Your product pages already have a questions and answers section, so the change looks cheap. Before anyone spends a day on it, it is worth checking what Google itself says today, because this particular piece of advice has gone out of date in two steps.

The short answer, as of 9 October 2026: Google no longer shows FAQ rich results for any site. FAQPage markup on a product page has no visible effect in Google Search, and Google has removed the documentation for it. The questions and answers themselves are still useful, but for other reasons than a bigger search result.

What Google has said, in order

In August 2023 Google announced that FAQ rich results would be shown far less. The post said that "FAQ (from FAQPage structured data) 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."¹ A shop selling backpacks was not going to qualify. The same post answered the obvious follow-up question about existing markup: "While you can drop this structured data from your site, there's no need to proactively remove it. Structured data that's not being used does not cause problems for Search, but also has no visible effects in Google Search."¹

The second step came this year. Google's Search Central changelog has an entry dated 8 May 2026, "Deprecating the FAQ rich result feature", which says: "This feature will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026."² On 15 June 2026 a further entry removed the documentation, because "The FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results".² When we checked on 9 October 2026, the old FAQPage documentation address redirected to that changelog entry.

So the audit advice was reasonable before August 2023, weak after August 2023, and has nothing behind it now. If an agency or a plugin still promises FAQ rich results, ask which Google page they are relying on.

Why QAPage markup is not the way around it

An obvious next idea is to switch to QAPage, the markup for question and answer pages, since product Q&A is literally questions and answers. Google's QAPage documentation (last updated 8 September 2026) rules this out quite directly. It says the markup is for pages where "the focus of the page is a single question and its answers", and it lists as an invalid use case: "A product page where users can submit multiple questions and answers on a single page".³ It also excludes "An FAQ page written by the site itself with no way for users to submit alternative answers".³

A product page with a Q&A section is exactly the first case. Marking it up as QAPage would be markup that does not match the page, which is not something to add on purpose.

There is also the question of AI answers in search. Google's guide on optimising for its generative AI features includes "overfocusing on structured data" in a list of things you can ignore, and says: "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add."⁴ The same paragraph recommends continuing to use structured data as part of your SEO work because it helps with eligibility for rich results. For a shop that means markup Google still documents, such as Product data for price and availability,⁵ not FAQPage.

What the questions on the page are still good for

None of this makes the content itself worthless. The markup was only ever a label on text that was already on the page. The text is still there: a shopper asked whether a 16 inch laptop fits the sleeve, you answered in plain words, and the next shopper with the same doubt reads it before she gives up or sends an email. That was always the main job of product Q&A, and it does not depend on any search feature.

There are a few other uses that tend to get overlooked:

• Questions show you what the product description is missing. If people keep asking about the sleeve size, the sleeve size belongs in the description and the attributes, where filters and comparison tables can use it too.
• A question answered on the page is answered once. Every repeat question that a shopper finds on the page instead of in your inbox is time your team keeps.
• Questions you mark as the important ones can be shown first, so the page leads with what matters rather than with whatever was asked last.

What to do with the FAQPage markup you already have

Following Google's 2023 statement, markup that is not used does not cause problems, so there is no urgency to remove it.¹ Other search engines and tools can read schema.org data as well, but we have not checked what any of them do with FAQPage today, so we would not count on it either way. If you prefer a lean page, removing it is also fine.

In our own Product Q&A module this is a single setting. Questions you mark as FAQ that are approved and have a store answer are printed as FAQPage JSON-LD, and customer answers are never included. Under Stores > Configuration > Softaware > Product Q&A > Structured Data, "Output FAQPage JSON-LD" switches it off. Turn it off as well if your SEO extension prints its own FAQ markup; developers can also take the question and answer pairs from the module's FaqProviderInterface and place them in their own structured data. The FAQ mark keeps its other job either way: FAQ questions are listed first on the product page and can be filtered.

If you are setting up a Q&A section in the first place, our post on product questions and answers without the spam covers moderation and notifications, and the Product Q&A page has the user guide and the demos.

Sources

1. Google Search Central Blog, "Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results" (8 August 2023), https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes, checked 9 October 2026. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3
2. Google Search Central, "Latest Google Search Documentation Updates", entries of 8 May 2026 and 15 June 2026, https://developers.google.com/search/updates, checked 9 October 2026. ↩1 ↩2
3. Google Search Central, "Q&A (QAPage) structured data", https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/qapage, checked 9 October 2026. ↩1 ↩2
4. Google Search Central, "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search", https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide, checked 9 October 2026. ↩
5. Google Search Central, "Introduction to Product structured data", https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/product, checked 9 October 2026. ↩