FAQPage vs HowTo: both got cut, so why keep either?

FAQPage vs HowTo: both got cut, so why keep either?
As of the 2023 rollbacks, Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government/health sites and killed HowTo rich results entirely. The reflex was to rip out the markup. That's the wrong comparison.
— Keep FAQPage when your content genuinely is Q&A: AI assistants and Search's own systems still parse it for entity context even without the visual snippet
— Keep HowTo schema only as a content-structure signal, not for visuals — the carousel is gone for good
— Drop neither for 'rich result' reasons; drop them only if the markup misrepresents the page
What it means for you: structured data outlived its rich result. The visual payoff vanished but the machine-readability didn't, and LLM search rewards clean Q&A structure. Watch this: the FAQ snippet may never return to Google, but its value migrated to AI answer engines that quote structured Q&A verbatim.