Still pumping FAQ and HowTo markup? You're optimizing a ghost

Still pumping FAQ and HowTo markup? You're optimizing a ghost

Long confirmed but still ignored by half the sites we audit: Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites, and killed HowTo rich results outright across desktop and mobile. The markup still validates clean, which is exactly why teams keep shipping it and wondering why nothing shows.

What it means for you: FAQ and HowTo JSON-LD now buys you zero SERP real estate on a normal site. It's not harmful, but it's dead weight in your render budget and a false signal in your reporting dashboards.

Watch this: don't delete the underlying content — repurpose those Q&As into the page body where AI Overviews and answer engines still mine them. The rich result is gone; the citability isn't.