If you added FAQPage markup, watched the expandable questions appear under your result, and then watched them vanish — you did not break anything. Google switched them off for almost everybody, and the markup on your page is very likely still valid.
This trips people up because every diagnostic tool keeps saying the markup is fine. The Rich Results Test passes. Search Console reports valid items. And still nothing shows. The gap is not technical, it is a policy change most people never saw announced.
The short version
In August 2023 Google restricted FAQ rich results to well-known, authoritative government and health websites. Every other site lost them, regardless of markup quality. There is no fix, because nothing is broken.
What actually changed
On 8 August 2023 Google announced a reduction in how often two rich result types are shown. FAQ rich results — the expandable question list under a search result — became limited to what Google described as well-known, authoritative government and health websites. At the same time, HowTo rich results were restricted to desktop only, and were later deprecated entirely.
The reasoning given was that these result types had become noise. FAQ markup in particular had been widely bolted onto pages that were not really FAQs, because it visibly expanded the amount of space a listing occupied. It worked, so everyone did it, and the results page filled with accordions.
The important detail for you: this was a display decision, not a validation change. Google did not declare FAQPage markup invalid. It stopped rendering it as a rich result for most domains. That is why every testing tool still passes your page.
How to confirm this is what happened to you
Before assuming policy, rule out the ordinary explanations. Work through these in order — it takes about five minutes.
- Confirm the page is indexed. Use URL Inspection in Search Console on the exact canonical URL. An unindexed page shows nothing regardless of markup.
- Confirm the markup is in the rendered HTML. Still in URL Inspection, view the crawled page. If your FAQ block is injected by JavaScript that Googlebot did not execute, the markup effectively does not exist.
- Check the FAQ report in Search Console. If your items are listed as valid, Google has read and accepted them. Valid items plus no visible result is the signature of the policy restriction.
- Check whether the questions are visible on the page. FAQ markup describing content a visitor cannot see was always a violation, and that has not changed. If your questions live in markup only, fix that regardless.
If the page is indexed, the markup is in the rendered HTML, Search Console reports valid items, and the questions are genuinely visible — you have hit the policy limit. There is nothing further to fix.
Should you remove FAQPage markup now?
No — but you should be honest with yourself about why it is there.
Structured data does two different jobs. One is triggering a visual treatment in search results. The other is telling machines what a page contains. The first job is gone for FAQ on most sites. The second has not changed, and is arguably more valuable now than it was in 2023, because considerably more systems read structured data than did then: assistants, aggregators, and increasingly the models that summarise web content.
So the honest position is: keep the markup if your page genuinely has a question-and-answer section, because it accurately describes the page. Remove it if you added it purely to win the accordion, because in that case it was probably describing content that was never really an FAQ in the first place.
A useful test
Would you still have written this Q&A section if rich results had never existed? If yes, keep the markup. If no, the content is the problem, not the schema.
What to do with the effort instead
The instinct after losing a rich result is to chase a different one. That is usually the wrong move, because most of the remaining types are not eligible for your pages either. A better use of the same hour:
- Fix the result types you are actually eligible for. Product, Article, LocalBusiness, Event, Video and JobPosting are all still fully supported. Most sites running FAQ markup have at least one of these implemented incorrectly. Our required vs recommended properties reference lists exactly what each one needs.
- Audit for silent failures. Markup that validates and still produces nothing is far more common than markup that errors. We wrote up every Rich Results Test error and what it really means, including the whole category of valid-but-ignored markup that FAQ now belongs to.
- Improve the answers themselves. The FAQ content on your page can still win the result — as a featured snippet, which is drawn from the visible content rather than the markup. Clear, direct, self-contained answers are what get pulled.
The wider lesson
Rich result types are not a stable platform. FAQ and HowTo were widely adopted, widely abused, and then withdrawn. The sites that were hurt most were the ones whose traffic strategy depended on a display feature rather than on the content underneath it.
Structured data is worth doing because it describes your page accurately to machines that need to understand it. Treat any rich result that follows as upside, not as the plan. That framing survives policy changes; the other one does not.