I got a message from a client a few weeks back. She’d read about Google officially phasing out FAQ rich results in May 2026, and her developer was keen to strip all the FAQPage markup off their site.

My advice: don’t touch a thing. In fact, write even more FAQ content.

I think Google getting rid of the rich snippet is probably the best thing to happen to FAQ SEO in years. Let me explain why that is.

What Google actually took away (and what they didn’t)

Now, I know some of the coverage has been a bit misleading, so let me get specific here.

Google stopped showing those expandable question-and-answer blocks under organic listings in May 7, 2026. Those rich snippets are no more.

But what Google didn’t do is tell you to remove your FAQPage markup. They actually said the schema can stay, and I think there’s a very good reason for that: AI Overviews are still using FAQ structured data like crazy.

For most businesses, this announcement just made zero impact. SISTRIX had already tracked the demise of FAQ snippets from mid-2023, and by August of that year over half had already disappeared. Google had already limited them to just a handful of government and health sites. Most businesses hadn’t seen them for years anyway.

The shift that really matters isn’t what Google took away. It’s what AI search has been quietly building to replace it.

FAQ content is just the format that AI systems and voice search were made to read

When I work with clients on GEO strategy, I keep coming back to this: FAQ content isn’t just useful for SEO anymore. It looks suspiciously like how AI platforms present information.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews all work in a very similar way when it comes to extracting info. They grab discrete chunks from pages and surface them inside a generated answer. The format they reach for most easily is a direct question paired with a direct answer.

The great thing about FAQPage schema is that it pre-packages your content in that exact format, which makes it easier for search engines and AI systems to interpret the questions and answers.

Pages with FAQPage schema are 3.2 times more likely to appear in Google AI Overviews, according to analysis from Launchcodex in 2026. That can improve search visibility beyond the older FAQ rich results. And the Frase.io team has found that FAQ schema has one of the highest citation rates of all schema types in AI-generated answers because the Q&A structure makes the AI’s job a heck of a lot easier. The model doesn’t have to spend ages trying to figure out what your content means – you’ve already told it.

Why the FAQ schema markup SEO playbook has changed since 2022

Two years ago, the FAQ SEO playbook was pretty straightforward: add FAQPage markup, get the rich snippet, take up more real estate in the results, get more clicks.

That playbook is now toast. The good news is that the replacement is actually even more effective.

For one, organic click-through rates for position one have dropped around 32% year over year, mainly because AI Overviews have started appearing on around 31% of search result pages, according to March 2026 data from Decoding. Traditional ranking just isn’t delivering the same click volume it used to.

But here’s the thing: when a brand gets cited inside an AI Overview, CTR jumps up by 35% compared to non-cited competitors on the same results page, according to data from position.digital.

The question isn’t even whether to do FAQ SEO as part of a broader seo strategy. The question is how to write FAQ content that gets pulled into AI answers while helping you capture more long tail keywords tied to different search intent patterns. And that’s a totally different brief from chasing a rich snippet – most sites haven’t even adjusted to that yet.

How to write FAQ content that actually gets extracted for featured snippets

I’ve been keeping an eye on how AI citation patterns work with client content. And the thing that consistently gets pulled is not what most SEO content sections look like.

The common mistake is writing FAQ answers like you would explain something to a customer in a sales conversation: loads of context, a caveat, a qualification, then the actual answer at the end.

AI systems don’t read like that. They break pages down into individual passages, score each one separately against the query, and cite the strongest standalone chunk. An analysis of 10,000 AI citations in 2025 found that pages with tables got cited 4.2 times more often than equivalent prose. Same principle applies to FAQ answers: the shorter and more direct, the more extractable, especially when you want clear answers, keep answers short, and improve visibility in featured snippets, ai summaries, and voice search results.

Here’s what actually works in practice:

• Lead with the answer in the first sentence. Don’t build up to it.
• Keep each answer to three to five sentences, ideally around 40-60 words per answer. If it needs more than that, it’s probably two questions.
• Write as if the answer will be ripped straight out of your page and slotted into an AI response, so write answers in natural language. If it needs context to make sense, it won’t get cited.
• Put your most important FAQ section in the first third of the page. Research on LLM citation behavior has found that 44.2% of citations come from the first 30% of a document – a pattern the research community calls the “ski ramp” attention effect.

The two types of FAQ pages content (and why most brands only do one)

Most SEO teams add FAQ sections to their service and product pages – and rightly so – just about everyone does it. But then there’s another use case that barely gets any attention: blog and pillar content built around answering specific questions that are structured specifically for people to extract the info they need.

Both serve distinct purposes.

Service page FAQs are there to address the objections and questions that potential buyers have when they’re considering your product or service. Questions like “How long does onboarding take?” and “Do you work with companies our size?” – these sorts of things come up a lot and people searching for them have a pretty strong idea of what they’re looking for. When you add faqs to these pages, grouping them by search intent or commercial intent makes the section easier to use. These questions also get picked up by AI systems when people ask a general category question.

A good faq block should help users find answers quickly and, where useful, point them to relevant pages with internal links.

Meanwhile, blog and pillar content that targets question-format queries – like this post – is looking to reach people who are doing some research on a topic before they’ve even thought about a vendor yet. A blog post FAQ can also target long tail keywords and question-led search demand naturally. And these days, a growing number of people are searching for things like this via ChatGPT or Perplexity rather than Google. If your content isn’t written with the express intention of being extractible, it just won’t show up in those search results.

Building both – ie service page FAQs and question-focused blog content – and writing it with the aim of making it easily extractible, is the FAQ SEO approach that’s going to hold up under any AI search scenario.

As a bit of a practical note: a well written faq page usually does better with 5 to 10 strong questions than a bloated list of thin ones. If you’re planning out your content and looking for some high-leverage formats to focus on, FAQ content is looking pretty good right now. The keyword clusters are relatively low in difficulty, the format works well with how AI systems like to cite things, and the type of content is still pretty under-optimized compared to what most people were doing back in the pre-2023 rich snippet days. Just don’t reuse the same questions across multiple pages or more sites, because duplicate FAQ content weakens SEO value.

What this means for your content plan right now

If you’re in the middle of planning content and looking for a high-leverage format to focus on, FAQ content is probably a good place to start. It just feels like a good fit for where things are at right now.

A few things I’d recommend prioritising:

• If you haven’t done it yet, every service page should have a dedicated FAQ section. A good faq page should answer real customer questions rather than filler queries. I’d say go for at least 6 or 8 questions, each with a direct answer and marked up with FAQPage schema. If you’ve already got existing service pages without this, it’s a pretty quick update to make, and it’s the kind of thing that will start to pay off in terms of AI citations over time. For faq pages important to the site, use a dedicated faq page only when the topic needs broader coverage than an in-page section.
• When creating new blog content, think about what question people would be searching for before the actual keyword search term. “Why do FAQ pages help with SEO” is a better example of a question format search that captures the same searchers as “faq seo” – but also aligns with how people tend to type things into ChatGPT and Perplexity. To find those questions, look at customer support inquiries, use Google Search Console to find question-based queries, check the People Also Ask section, and use Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer to surface related questions. These sources help confirm search demand and reflect how people search, including voice search queries.
• And if you’ve got existing FAQ content that was written with the old rich snippet era in mind, it’s worth reviewing it and making sure the answers are written with the intention of being extractible rather than just being a bunch of waffly text. A good faq keeps the language clear and natural. Long, conversational answers need to be trimmed back a bit. Write the direct answer first, then the supporting detail.

One other thing worth knowing: if you’re trying to measure the impact of your FAQ SEO efforts, you can’t just rely on standard Google Search Console data any more. You need to be tracking AI visibility alongside your usual SEO KPIs if you want to see what’s actually working.

The underlying principle here is the same one that’s running through every effective content strategy right now: structure and specificity beat length any day. AI is just going to pull the clearest answer it can find, so build your content around that. If you need help building a content approach focused on these formats, that’s exactly the kind of work we do at Shortlist. And if you want the broader Google context, the May 2026 core update post is a good place to start.