FAQ Schema for Local Businesses in 2026: What Still Works After Google's Rich Result Changes

Google reduced how often FAQ rich results appear and limited them mostly to authoritative government and health sites. At the same time, it deprecated HowTo rich results. For a roofer, plumber, or insurance agent, adding FAQPage markup no longer reliably produces a visual feature in search results.

Google did not say the markup is harmful. Valid FAQPage markup can remain on your pages, and Google still reads structured data to understand page content.

People and AI assistants ask questions. A page that answers the exact question a homeowner types, in two or three clear sentences, is easier to understand, quote, and recommend. AI answers from tools like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity often pull from pages that have direct, well-organized answers.

That means the value has shifted from the markup to the writing. Our guide to page structure that gets cited by AI answers covers how to format these answers.

Use it when the page genuinely contains a list of questions and answers written by you, visible to visitors, and not repeated identically across dozens of pages. It is a clean, machine-readable summary of content that already exists. It costs little to maintain if your site generates it automatically from the visible questions.

Do not use it for marketing slogans disguised as questions, for content hidden from users, or for user-submitted questions where many answers exist. Those cases belong to different types or none at all.

Use the words customers actually say. Put the direct answer in the first sentence. Keep most answers to 40 to 80 words. Include a specific detail when you have one, such as a service area, a typical timeline, or a policy rule. Link to a deeper page when the topic needs more space.

Avoid vague answers like "It depends on many factors." If it depends, name the two or three factors that matter most.

Service pages, city or service area pages, pricing pages, and policy pages are the best places. Each page should have questions specific to that topic, not the same five questions copied everywhere. Duplicated FAQs add little and can make pages look templated.

Pull questions from your phone calls, emails, and reviews. The questions your staff answer every week are the questions people are searching.

Check your markup with the Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator, and fix any errors. Make sure the questions in the markup exactly match the visible questions on the page. If you want a broader view of which types still earn features, see structured data beyond LocalBusiness.