The Search Engine Journal isn’t exempt from fear mongering and misguided information. This artical is so poorly written, it sounds like using FAQ’s for schema is dead and the sky is falling on the proverbial SEO collective. No wonder people are confused and can’t get their terminology right.
FAQ rich results and using FAQs as structured content for AI systems are related — but they are not the same thing.
For years, FAQ schema was primarily used to help search engines like Google generate enhanced “FAQ rich results” directly in traditional search listings (AIO) in browsers. These rich results displayed expandable questions and answers underneath organic search results. However, Google has significantly reduced how often FAQ rich results appear publicly (since 2023), especially for most commercial websites. That does not mean FAQ content or FAQ schema has lost value. I honestly haven’t seen one of these in over a year on any result.
However, in today’s world – FAQs serve a much larger purpose in AI search, AI Overviews, voice assistants, and IoT-connected devices such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant. AI systems use FAQ content as structured, context-rich training and retrieval material that helps models understand your business, services, products, terminology, and customer intent.
Real world explanation:
Unlike traditional FAQ rich snippets, AI systems are not simply displaying your FAQ visually in search results — they are extracting meaning, relationships, and authoritative answers from the content itself.
You just haven’t noticed they’ve been gone for over three years, until Google made an announcement about them being gone May 7th of this year. That and all the SEO news outlets picket up on it on and needed something to write about.
Well-written FAQs help AI platforms:
- Understand natural language questions customers actually ask
- Associate your brand with specific services, industries, and expertise
- Generate more accurate AI Overview summaries
- Improve visibility in conversational and voice-based searches
- Support answer generation on smart devices and AI assistants
- Provide structured semantic content that machines can interpret clearly
This is why FAQs should still be part of modern SEO and AI optimization strategies, even if rich snippets no longer appear frequently in Google Search. FAQs are now less about “getting extra lines in search results” and more about training AI systems with trusted, organized, machine-readable information about your business. Think getting answers about your business in ChatGPT, Claud and OpenAI, not just search engine results.
In modern AI search, FAQ schema acts more like a structured knowledge layer for large language models (LLM) and retrieval systems rather than simply a visual search enhancement. The businesses that continue building detailed FAQ content today are helping shape how AI platforms understand and recommend their brand tomorrow.
