Search Visibility

The Structured Data That Earns Nothing

Two of the most widely implemented schema types no longer produce anything in Google Search. HowTo stopped in 2023. FAQ stopped on 7 May 2026, and the reporting for it was removed from Search Console that January. Most sites that added them have never taken them out, because nothing breaks when a rich result quietly stops existing.

Have your markup checked The two that are gone

Start here

Which One Is You

Three ways this turns up. The first two are discoveries, the third is a decision.

  • 01

    You paid for schema in the last few years

    Check what types were actually added. If the deliverable was FAQ or HowTo markup, it is producing nothing in Google Search today regardless of how correctly it was implemented.

    The two that are gone
  • 02

    Your rich results disappeared

    Before assuming an error, check the date against the deprecations. Two whole feature classes ended on published dates, and the markup on your page will still validate perfectly.

    Why nothing warned you
  • 03

    You are deciding what to add now

    Work from the gallery of features that currently exist rather than from a list of schema types. The question is which result you want, not which markup you can write.

    What still earns something

The deprecations

Two Types, Both Retired, Both Still Everywhere

Two deprecations, four years apart, with the same shape: the feature stopped appearing, the markup stayed valid, and nothing on the site changed to tell anybody.

  • HowTo

    Retired August 2023

    Google

    Removed the How-to structured data documentation, as this rich result is no longer shown in search results, on both desktop and mobile devices.

    Google removed the documentation as well as the feature. Any HowTo markup written after that date was written against a page that had already been taken down, usually by a plugin that had not been updated.

  • FAQ

    Retired May 2026, with reporting removed in January

    Google

    The FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results.

    This one is more recent and much more widely deployed, because FAQ markup was the standard upsell on almost every content page for years. Google also removed support from Search Console rich result reporting, the Rich Results Test and the search appearance filters in January 2026, so the place you would look to notice the loss stopped showing it four months before the feature ended.

Neither is a penalty and neither is an error. Both are simply markup describing a feature that no longer exists.

Why nobody noticed

It Fails Without Failing

The reason this survives on so many sites is that every signal you would normally rely on keeps saying everything is fine.

Every check keeps passing while the feature behind the markup is gone A chain of four checks running left to right, each drawn as a panel with a tick: the markup is well formed, the validator passes, Search Console reports no error, and the page is indexed normally. All four are marked as passing. At the end of the chain, where the rich result should be, there is an empty dashed outline marked feature retired, with no warning attached to it anywhere in the chain. A separate note records that for FAQ the Search Console reporting was withdrawn in January 2026, four months before the feature itself stopped appearing in May, so the one place a loss would have shown went blank before there was a loss to show. EVERY CHECK YOU WOULD RUN Markup is well formed Validator passes No error in Search Console Page indexed normally × No rich result FEATURE RETIRED AND FOR FAQ, THE REPORT WENT FIRST JANUARY 2026 reporting removed 7 MAY 2026 feature stops appearing four months with nowhere to notice The report went to zero before the traffic did, which reads as a reporting change rather than a loss.
Four passes and no result. For FAQ, the report went blank four months before the feature did.
  • 01

    The markup still validates

    FAQPage and HowTo remain real schema.org types. A validator checks whether the markup is well formed, not whether Google does anything with it.

  • 02

    Nothing appears as an error

    There is no warning state for correct markup describing a retired feature. The absence is silent by design.

  • 03

    The report stopped before the feature did

    For FAQ, Search Console reporting was withdrawn in January and the feature ended in May. Anybody watching the report saw it go to zero months before the traffic did, and would reasonably have read that as a reporting change.

  • 04

    The traffic loss looks like something else

    Losing an FAQ accordion in the result changes how much space you occupy and how many clicks that space earns. Read without the deprecation date beside it, the shape looks like an algorithm update.

The general lesson

This is the general lesson rather than a fact about two schema types. Structured data fails silently, and the only reliable check is against the current list of features, not against a validator.

Including here

This Site Was Carrying Both

This site carried both until the day this page was written.

What was on this site

Every problem page here emitted FAQPage, and the video verification page emitted HowTo for its upload steps. Both were implemented carefully and both validated. Both were producing exactly nothing, and had been since the relevant dates. They were removed while this page was being written, and replaced with an Article node carrying the author, the modification date taken from the files that render the page, and the sources the page actually lists on its face.

Worth saying plainly because the alternative is a page that tells you to audit your markup while carrying the same dead nodes. The check took ten minutes. Nobody had done it, on a site whose entire subject is checking things against what platforms actually publish.

The route

Start From The Result, Not The Markup

What to do, and the order matters because it is the reverse of how schema is usually sold.

  1. 01

    Start from the result, not the markup

    Open Google's gallery of search features that structured data can produce and pick the ones your business could plausibly earn. A schema type with no feature behind it is a text file.

  2. 02

    Check what you already emit

    View source on your top ten pages and read the JSON-LD. Most sites are carrying types nobody chose, added by a theme or a plugin years ago.

  3. 03

    Delete what is retired

    HowTo and FAQ first. It changes nothing in the results, which is the point: it removes a claim you are making about the page for no return, and it shortens the file.

  4. 04

    Keep what still resolves to a feature

    Breadcrumbs, products, events, recipes, job postings, videos and organisation and person entities all still do something, subject to their own eligibility rules.

  5. 05

    Diarise the check

    Twice a year against the gallery. Deprecations are announced and then forgotten, and nothing on your own site will ever remind you.

Unchanged

The Guidance That Did Not Move

The general guidance has not changed, and it is short.

  1. 01

    JSON-LD is the recommended format

    Google recommends JSON-LD where a site's setup allows it, as the easiest to implement and maintain at scale.

  2. 02

    It must match the page

    Structured data has to accurately represent the page content, complete and up to date.

  3. 03

    It must be reachable

    Markup Googlebot cannot access is markup that does not exist.

  4. 04

    It is not an AI lever

    Google's generative AI guide states structured data is not required for generative AI search and there is no special markup to add for it.

Questions

The Ones That Keep Coming Up

No. Google states the FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results, from 7 May 2026. Support was also removed from Search Console rich result reporting, the Rich Results Test and the search appearance filters in January 2026.

There is no published penalty for it. It simply produces nothing. The argument for removing it is cleanliness and honesty about what the page is claiming, not risk.

Check the date first. Two whole feature classes ended on published dates, and in both cases the markup on the page continues to validate perfectly. A deprecation and an update look identical in a traffic graph and are told apart by a calendar.

Work from Google's gallery of features rather than from a list of types. Breadcrumbs, product, event, recipe, job posting, video and the organisation and person entities all still resolve to something, each with its own eligibility rules.

Google says structured data is not required for generative AI search and that there is no special schema.org markup to add for it. Implement it for the ordinary rich results it has always driven.

Twice a year against the current gallery. Deprecations are announced once and then nothing on your own site ever mentions them again, which is exactly how markup for a feature retired in 2023 survives into 2026.

These questions are written out as ordinary content rather than marked up as an FAQPage, for the reason the whole page is about.

Where this came from

Every Quote On This Page

Google Search Central, checked against the live pages on 10 September 2026.

Written by

Zammy Zaif

Global search and business growth strategist. This page began as a routine check of somebody else's markup and ended with me removing the same two dead types from this site.

Want to know what your markup is actually earning?

Send me a URL. Reading the JSON-LD on a handful of pages against the current feature list takes very little time, and it is one of the few audits that produces a definite answer rather than an opinion.

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