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Agent LighthouseAgent Lighthouse

    Searches the text of every published page. The evidence sources themselves are not in this index — search all of them on the trusted sources page.

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    structured-data/faqpage-schema

    FAQPage schema

    What it checks

    AI answer engines like Perplexity and Google SGE extract FAQ-structured content with higher confidence for direct answers. FAQPage schema makes your Q&A content machine-readable, giving it priority in AI-generated responses over unstructured text.

    Why it matters

    Google Search parses FAQPage markup and renders its Question/acceptedAnswer pairs as an expandable FAQ rich result beneath the page’s search listing.

    Evidence

    • Google’s own FAQPage documentation records the restriction: the FAQ rich result “is only shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites”. It then records the removal of the feature and its documentation. The changelog states that “The FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results”, under a deprecation notice effective 7 May 2026 — developers.google.com/…/faqpage (verified 2026-08-21)
    • FAQ is absent from Google’s current structured data gallery. Of the features listed there, Breadcrumb, Article, Local business, Review snippet and Organization all remain; FAQ does not — developers.google.com/…/search-gallery (verified 2026-08-21)
    • The convention nevertheless persists and is still growing: FAQPage rose from 0.2% of desktop pages in 2022 to 0.6% in 2024 — almanac.httparchive.org/…/structured-data (verified 2026-08-21)
    • The one remaining vendor gesture toward FAQ markup is a Microsoft Advertising marketing post: “Schema can label your content as a product, review, FAQ, or event, turning plain text into structured data that machines can interpret with confidence”. That is a secondary source, and it names no consuming system and no mechanism — about.ads.microsoft.com/…/optimizing-your-content-f… (verified 2026-08-21)

    Limits

    Nothing supports the audit description’s specific claim that “AI answer engines like Perplexity and Google SGE extract FAQ-structured content with higher confidence for direct answers”. Google states the opposite of the premise: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add” — developers.google.com/…/ai-features (verified 2026-08-21). A controlled fetch test found ChatGPT (37.5% of values recovered), Claude (0%), Perplexity (12.5%) and Google AI Mode (25%) all failed to read data present only in JSON-LD — searchviu.com/…/schema-markup-and-ai-in-2025-what-c… (verified 2026-08-21).

    A matched difference-in-differences study of 1,885 pages adding JSON-LD found AI Mode +2.4% and ChatGPT +2.2% (both noise) and AI Overviews −4.6% — ahrefs.com/…/schema-ai-citations (verified 2026-08-21)

    How it scores

    The only documented consumer path for this signal has been withdrawn: Google first restricted the FAQ rich result to authoritative government and health sites, then retired the feature and dropped it from the structured data gallery. No other vendor documents a named consumer, so what remains is a widely-published community convention with a plausible but unproven mechanism.

    Sources