FAQ Schema
FAQ schema is structured data marking up a page's questions and their answers. It gives search engines and AI systems clean question-answer pairs to extract. Google restricted its rich result display in 2023, but the markup still aids machine understanding.
Why it matters for your rankings
FAQ schema used to be a reliable way to occupy more vertical space in search results. Google limited that display to government and health sites in August 2023, so the visible payoff largely disappeared.
It remains worth implementing for a different reason. Answer engines and AI overviews consume structured data heavily, and a clean question-answer pair is the easiest possible format for them to lift and cite. The markup also enforces a useful discipline on the page itself: writing a genuine question and a self-contained answer produces exactly the passage structure that both featured snippets and AI systems favour. Just do not implement it expecting the rich result that no longer appears for most sites.
How to check it on your site
Mark up real on-page questions
The schema must match visible content exactly. Marking up questions that do not appear on the page is a guidelines violation.
Validate the markup
Run the page through Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator to catch syntax errors.
Keep answers self-contained
Each answer should make sense in isolation, since that is how an answer engine will quote it.
Use JSON-LD in the head
It is easier to maintain than inline microdata and is the format Google recommends.