FAQ schema is dead. The data says so. Twice.

Google announced the end a year ahead of it, in a notice dated May 8, 2025: "This feature will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026." The date arrived, the feature went, and in June 2026 Google retired the FAQPage documentation itself. This was not a restriction and not a gradual rollout — it is the end state, and there is no longer a live doc page to argue with.

The timeline matters because the tooling came down in stages, and those stages are now complete. FAQ rich results stopped appearing immediately. June 2026 removed the FAQ search appearance filter, the Search Console rich result report, and Rich Results Test support. August 2026 removed FAQ data from the Search Console API. If your dashboards still chart FAQ impressions, they have already gone dark.

The gov/health carveout is gone as well. From August 2023 to May 2026 the feature was served only to "well-known, authoritative websites that are government-focused or health-focused," and that sentence outlived the feature in Google's documentation, which is why write-ups still repeat it. It describes the old state. Since May 7, 2026 FAQ rich results are served to nobody, government and health included.

This is the second time Google has killed FAQ. In August 2023 they restricted the feature to gov/health sites. In May 2026 they finished the job. The pattern matters more than the date, and we'll come back to that in Chapter 04.

While the SEO community was debating whether to add more schema for AI search, Ahrefs ran the only thing the conversation was missing: an actual controlled experiment. Published in 2026, it tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD schema between August 2025 and March 2026, matched against 4,000 control pages with similar pre-treatment citation levels.

The headline result: adding schema produced no major lift in AI citations on AI Mode (+2.4%, not significant) or ChatGPT (+2.2%, not significant). On Google AI Overviews it produced a statistically significant decline of −4.6%. This is the inverse of what most SEO blogs were claiming.

The methodology matters because the original correlation was strong. Pages cited by AI were almost three times more likely to have JSON-LD than non-cited pages. But when Ahrefs controlled for confounders — technically sophisticated sites tend to have both schema and citations — the causal effect collapsed.

Google's first page on AI features in Search carries a December 2025 date, and in May 2026 it published a dedicated guide to optimizing for generative AI features. The May 2026 document is the one that names what does not work, and it is the closest thing to a primary source for what AI Overviews and AI Mode reward.

Google explicitly lists four things you can ignore: chunking content into tiny pieces, rewriting content specifically for AI systems, creating AI-specific files (this is widely read as including llms.txt), and pursuing inauthentic mentions across the web. These are not soft suggestions — the document tells site owners to "ignore" them.

What Google says does work is the same thing it has said for years: be indexable, follow snippet eligibility rules, comply with spam policies, and create "unique, compelling, and useful" content with original perspective. Structured data "remains a good idea as part of your overall SEO strategy" but "isn't required specifically for AI features."

The implication is uncomfortable for the GEO industry: there is no special schema, no markup, no file, no incantation that gets your content into AI answers. The mechanism is the same content quality bar Google has asked for since at least 2022 — just harder to game.