For almost three years, behavioral health websites had a quiet advantage in Google Search. When Google cut back FAQ rich results in August 2023, it kept showing them for “well-known, authoritative government and health websites.” Some health providers kept the expandable question-and-answer dropdowns under their listings long after everyone else lost them. That advantage is now gone for every site, and the way it ended says a lot about where structured data still matters.
This post covers what Google changed, what the FAQPage markup on your site does now, and what treatment providers should do with their FAQ content instead of either deleting it or chasing a replacement trick.
What Google changed, and when
The timeline is short and fully documented by Google. On August 8, 2023, Google announced it was reducing the visibility of FAQ rich results, limiting them to authoritative government and health sites. The same announcement limited How-to rich results to desktop, and a September 2023 update to that post retired How-to results entirely.
In 2026 Google finished the job. The Search Central documentation changelog carries a May 8, 2026 entry adding a deprecation notice and stating the feature would no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026. On June 15, 2026, Google removed the FAQ rich result documentation entirely, noting the feature is no longer shown in Google Search results. When we checked on October 2, 2026, the old FAQPage documentation URL redirected to that changelog, and FAQ no longer appeared in Google’s gallery of supported structured data features.
Here is the paragraph we give anyone who asks whether their FAQ dropdowns are coming back: Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search starting May 7, 2026, and removed the FAQPage rich result documentation on June 15, 2026. FAQPage structured data on a treatment center’s website no longer produces any visible enhancement in Google Search results, including for health websites that kept the feature after the August 2023 restriction. The markup does not cause a penalty, and the questions and answers on the page still count as normal page content.
Why health sites were the last ones standing
The 2023 restriction is worth understanding because it explains the final decision. Google did not say health sites were abusing FAQ markup. It said it wanted a “cleaner and more consistent search experience,” and it let the feature continue only where an authoritative answer shown directly in the results was most defensible: government services and health information.
Eligibility was automatic. There was no application, no list, and no setting in Search Console that switched it on. A large hospital system or an established health publisher was far more likely to qualify than a single-location outpatient program, and two sites with identical, valid markup could get different treatment. Valid markup was necessary, but it was never the deciding factor.
That is the first lesson of the retirement. A rich result is a presentation decision Google makes; your markup only makes you eligible for it. When Google decides a presentation no longer serves searchers, eligibility stops mattering overnight, regardless of how carefully the markup was written.
What your FAQPage markup does now
Many treatment center sites still have FAQPage JSON-LD on admissions pages, insurance pages and program pages, often added automatically by a theme or SEO plugin years ago. Here is what that markup does and does not do today.
No visible enhancement: Google no longer renders FAQ dropdowns in Search for any site, so the markup produces nothing users can see in the results.
No penalty: Google’s 2023 announcement stated that structured data that isn’t being used “does not cause problems for Search,” and nothing in the 2026 changelog contradicts that.
No AI search advantage: Google’s guide to optimizing for generative AI features states that structured data isn’t required for generative AI search and that there is no special schema.org markup you need to add.
Still valid vocabulary: FAQPage remains a defined type on Schema.org, so the markup is not broken or invalid. Google simply no longer turns it into a search feature.
Our own FAQ page still carries FAQPage markup as of this writing. We are leaving it in place for now, because Google says unused markup causes no harm and removing it would gain nothing.
The mistake we expect to see next
Whenever a visible search feature disappears, the industry looks for a replacement lever. With FAQ rich results gone, expect pitches for “AI schema,” FAQ markup “for AI Overviews,” llms.txt files, and rewriting pages into short, self-contained chunks so language models can digest them.
Google has addressed each of these directly. The same AI optimization guide says Google Search ignores llms.txt files, that site owners can ignore tactics like “chunking” content, and that there is no ideal page length. For a treatment provider with a limited marketing budget, money spent on these tactics is money not spent on pages that actually answer what families are asking.
This matters more in behavioral health than in most industries. Admissions questions are often asked at a hard moment: a parent searching late at night, a spouse trying to understand what insurance covers, a person deciding whether they can step away from work for treatment. The answer that earns that click is the clearest and most accurate one, not the one wrapped in the most markup.
What to do with your FAQ content instead
The questions themselves are still valuable. Most treatment center FAQ sections exist because admissions staff hear the same questions every day. That content was never worthless; only the rich result went away. Here is how to handle it now.
Keep FAQs on the pages they belong to. A question about whether a program accepts a specific insurance plan belongs on the insurance or admissions page, not on a standalone FAQ page that repeats content from five other URLs. Google evaluates the page as a whole, so a question answered in context strengthens the page that actually needs to rank.
Write answers that stand alone. Each answer should make sense if someone reads only that answer. Name the program, state the specific fact, and include the detail that matters: the typical length of a detox stay at your facility, whether you run evening intensive outpatient groups, or how long insurance verification usually takes your team. Use only figures your clinical and admissions teams will stand behind.
Keep the answers accurate and compliant. FAQ answers about insurance, outcomes and treatment methods are subject to the same advertising standards as the rest of your site. Avoid outcome claims you cannot substantiate, and never use patient stories or identifying details in an answer. Losing the dropdown made inaccurate answers less visible in search results; it did not make them any less of a risk on the page.
Put effort into structured data Google still documents. Organization, local business and breadcrumb markup all remain in Google’s gallery of supported structured data. They help Google connect your website to your organization and your physical locations, which is the foundation of local search. That is where an SEO engagement for a treatment provider should start, rather than with markup that no longer surfaces.
A five-minute check you can run today
You can see whether your site still carries FAQ markup, and where, without any special tools.
- Open your admissions page in Chrome, right-click, and choose View Page Source.
- Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for
FAQPage. - If it appears, note which plugin or theme added it. On WordPress sites it is usually an SEO plugin’s FAQ block or its schema settings.
- Repeat the search on your insurance, program and location pages.
- For each match, read the visible questions and answers out loud. If an answer is outdated, vague, or contradicts what your admissions team tells callers, fix the visible text first. That text is what searchers and Google actually read.
You do not need to remove the markup. If you are rebuilding the site anyway, it is reasonable to drop it and keep templates simpler, which is a decision worth making deliberately during any website redesign rather than leaving to a plugin default.
The broader point about search features
FAQ rich results followed the same arc as How-to rich results before them: introduced, widely adopted, restricted, then retired. Google’s changelog shows a steady pattern of simplifying search results, and the features that remain tend to be tied to real-world facts such as a business’s location, hours and reviews.
For behavioral health providers, that points toward a durable strategy. Invest in pages that answer real questions accurately, keep your Google Business Profile and location details consistent, and treat any single search feature as temporary. That is also the honest version of answer engine optimization: Google’s own guidance says the content that gets surfaced in its AI features is helpful, non-commodity content built on normal SEO fundamentals, not special markup.
