If someone added FAQ markup to your website in the last few years, they did it for a good reason: it earned extra space in the search results, pushed competitors further down the page, and cost almost nothing to implement. In May 2026 that reward quietly disappeared for the vast majority of sites. The markup still validates. It just no longer shows anything.
FAQ was not the only casualty. Google has been steadily retiring rich result types it considers low-value or too narrow, and the pattern is now clear enough to plan around. The question business owners keep asking us is the sensible one: if the visible reward is gone, is structured data still worth paying for? The answer is yes, but for a different reason than three years ago.
The retirements have come in waves. Specialist types with limited adoption went first, followed by FAQ rich results for almost everyone. Search Console reporting and the Rich Results Test drop the retired types at the same time, which is usually how site owners notice.
Two points matter more than the list itself.
Retired does not mean penalised. The schema.org vocabulary is unchanged, your existing markup is still valid, and Google has repeatedly confirmed there is no ranking penalty for leaving it in place. You do not need an emergency clean-up.
Retired does mean re-budget. If a proposal on your desk prices up FAQ markup across two hundred pages as an SEO deliverable, that line item is now buying you nothing visible. Spend it on markup that still does something.
For most businesses the working list has narrowed to a handful of types, and they are the commercially important ones.
Price, availability, and star ratings still appear in search results and in shopping surfaces, and they still move click-through rates. If you sell anything, this is the markup to get right first — and to keep accurate, because a price mismatch between your markup and your page is one of the few structured data errors that genuinely hurts you.
Opening hours, address, phone number, service area and social profiles feed the panels people see when they search your name. This is also the markup that answer engines lean on when they need to state a fact about you rather than summarise an opinion.
Breadcrumbs still render in results and cost nothing. Article markup carries author, publisher and modification dates. Video markup with key moments remains one of the few ways to earn extra real estate on a crowded page.
Here is the shift. Structured data used to be a way of buying a bigger listing. It is now mostly a way of removing ambiguity for systems that never show a listing at all.
When an AI assistant answers a question about your opening hours, your price, or whether you serve a particular area, it is reconciling several sources. Clean, consistent markup is the cheapest way to make sure the machine-readable version of your business agrees with the human-readable one. Businesses that get cited accurately tend to be businesses whose facts are unambiguous.
Structured data has stopped being a way to win a bigger snippet and become a way to make sure the answer about you is correct.
That reframes the value. You are not chasing a star rating in a search result; you are making sure that when something summarises your business without sending you a visitor, it summarises it right.
Stop paying for markup that no longer renders, keep the commercial types accurate, and treat your Organization and LocalBusiness data as a fact sheet that machines read on your behalf. The audit takes half an hour, the corrections usually take an afternoon, and the result is a site that is harder to misrepresent — in search results and in the answers that increasingly replace them.
We audit structured data as part of every SEO engagement — and fix the parts that are quietly wrong.
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