How to Check Your FAQ Schema (and What Actually Matters Now That Rich Results Are Gone)

You added FAQ schema to your pages expecting those tidy expandable questions under your Google listing. Then they vanished. If you went looking for a way to check whether your FAQ markup is still "working," you already sensed something changed, and you're right.

Here's the short version: FAQ rich results are gone, but FAQ schema is not dead. Checking it still matters, just for a different reason than it did two years ago. This guide walks through what changed, how to actually validate your FAQPage markup today, and why the check is arguably more useful now than when the rich result existed.

What happened to FAQ rich results

FAQ rich results were the expandable question-and-answer panels Google rendered beneath a search listing, powered by FAQPage structured data. For a while they were a genuine SERP land-grab, more vertical space, more clicks.

Then Google narrowed them. In August 2023 it rolled FAQ rich-result eligibility back to a small set of authoritative government and health sites; everyone else lost the display feature. In 2026 Google removed the feature entirely, FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Search, and FAQ support was dropped from the Rich Results Test and from Search Console's reporting.

So if you're validating FAQ markup today expecting a "rich result eligible" green light, you won't get one anymore. That's not a bug in your markup. The feature itself was retired.

Why FAQ schema is still worth checking

Our free SEO score checker will flag a page whose structured data is missing entirely. Two reasons, both practical.

First, FAQPage is still a valid Schema.org type. Google has said it continues to parse FAQ markup to understand a page's content, even without showing the rich result. Malformed markup is still malformed, it can throw errors that muddy how machines read your page.

Second, and this is the part most "FAQ is dead" takes miss, clean question-and-answer structure is exactly the format AI answer engines like. When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews assemble an answer, they favor content that already maps a specific question to a specific, self-contained answer. Your FAQ block is that, in machine-readable form. The rich result went away; the underlying signal to answer engines did not.

That reframes the check. You're no longer verifying "will Google draw a Q&A box for me." You're verifying "is my Q&A content structured cleanly enough for any engine, search or AI, to lift a correct answer from it."

How to check your FAQ schema, step by step

1. Find the markup. Open the page, view source, and search for FAQPage. Most FAQ schema ships as a JSON-LD block in the head or near the FAQ content. If you use a CMS plugin, confirm it's actually outputting the block on the live URL, not just in the editor preview.

1. Validate the syntax with the Schema Markup Validator. Go to validator.schema.org, paste your URL or the raw code, and run it. This is the generic Schema.org checker (the successor to Google's old Structured Data Testing Tool). It flags missing required properties, malformed nesting, and syntax errors against the Schema.org vocabulary, which is the right test now that Google-specific FAQ eligibility no longer exists.

1. Confirm the essentials are present. A valid FAQPage needs a mainEntity array of Question items, each with a name (the question) and an acceptedAnswer of type Answer with text (the answer). Answers should be complete and self-contained, no "click here to learn more" stubs.

1. Match markup to visible content. The questions and answers in your schema must exist as real, visible content on the page. Marking up Q&A that a user can't see is a structured-data guideline violation and a genuine risk. If you trimmed the FAQ section from the page but left the schema, remove the orphaned markup.

1. Check it across the whole site, not one URL at a time. The single-URL validators are fine for spot checks. The failure mode is scale: a template change or plugin update can break FAQ markup on hundreds of pages at once, and pasting URLs one by one won't catch that. This is where a crawler that inventories structured data site-wide earns its keep.

Common FAQ schema errors (and the fixes)

• Markup with no matching visible Q&A. Fix: only mark up questions and answers that appear on the page.
• Answers that are truncated or link out instead of answering. Fix: put the full answer in acceptedAnswer.text.
• Duplicate FAQ blocks from a theme and a plugin both injecting schema. Fix: pick one source of truth; remove the other.
• FAQ schema on the wrong page type (e.g. product or category pages padded with generic questions). Fix: reserve it for genuine FAQ content.
• Broken JSON-LD, a stray comma or unescaped quote that invalidates the whole block. Fix: run it through the validator after every template change.

Where an FAQ block still belongs, and where it does not

Validating your markup is only half the decision. The other half is whether that page should carry an FAQ block at all, and this is where a lot of sites quietly hurt themselves.

Keep it on pages where people genuinely arrive with questions. Pricing, product, service and support pages all qualify. A buyer weighing a decision really does want to know about contract length, refunds or setup time, and answering that on the page serves the reader first and the markup second.

Think twice on blog articles. A question block bolted to the end of an article almost always restates what the body already said. If the question is worth answering, answer it inside the article as its own section, phrased the way a reader would ask it. A trailing block that exists mainly to hold markup adds length without adding value.

Never mark up a question that is not visible. Answers that live only in the JSON-LD and nowhere on the rendered page break Google's structured data policies, and that applies whether or not any rich result is on offer.

The test is simple. Would a reader on this page actually ask this question? If the honest answer is no, remove the block rather than validating it.

What to do with the check once it passes

If the syntax still feels opaque, it helps to understand how JSON-LD works before you start editing blocks by hand. A passing FAQ check isn't the finish line, it's a green light to treat your Q&A content as answer-engine fuel. Write questions the way people actually phrase them out loud. Keep each answer complete on its own so an engine can quote it without needing the rest of the page. Then track whether those pages start showing up when AI tools answer questions in your niche, because that, not the old rich-result box, is where the value moved.

FAQ schema outlived its rich result. Check it, keep it clean, and point it at the engines that are still reading it.

Crawltide inventories the structured data across your whole site and flags broken or orphaned FAQ markup in one crawl, then tracks how you show up in AI answers. Start free at crawltide.com