Reduced Visibility For FAQ and HowTo Rich Results In Search

Google has announced that they will be reducing the visibility of FAQ and HowTo rich results to provide a cleaner and more consistent search experience
Marie Aquino
August 11, 2023

Google has announced that they will be reducing the visibility of FAQ and HowTo rich results in the Google Search Results. This is to provide a cleaner and more consistent search experience.

With these changes, the FAQ rich results will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. All other sites will no longer show the rich results regularly.

Does this mean you have to remove your FAQ structured data on your site? According to Google, there is no need to proactively remove it as structured data that is not being used by Google does not cause problems for Search, but also has no visible effects in the search results.

As for the HowTo rich results, this will only be shown for desktop users and not for those on mobile. Google notes that since the move to mobile indexing, they index the mobile version of a site as the basis for indexing. In order to have the HowTo rich results in desktop, the mobile version of the site still has to include the appropriate markup.

This particular update is rolling out globally, in all languages and countries over the course of the next week. This change does not have an effect on rank and would not be listed in the Search status dashboard.