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

Google's official documentation on FAQPage structured data now opens with a single sentence that ends a decade of FAQ-driven SEO: "As of May 7, 2026, FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search." This is not a restriction, not a gradual rollout — it is the end state.

The timeline matters because tooling is being decommissioned in stages. FAQ rich results stopped appearing immediately. The Rich Results Test will drop FAQ support in June 2026. The Search Console API will follow in August 2026. If your dashboards still chart FAQ impressions, they will go dark by Q3.

There is one carveout: FAQ rich results are still served for "well-known, authoritative websites that are government-focused or health-focused." For everyone else — SaaS, e-commerce, media, agencies — the schema produces nothing in Google.

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.

In December 2025 Google published its first official guide for optimizing content for AI features in Search. It is the closest thing to a primary source for what Google AI Overviews and AI Mode reward. The document is short and unambiguous about what does not work.

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.