FAQ schema on service pages in 2026: still worth the effort?

Google cut FAQ rich results back to a small set of government and health sites in 2023 and dropped HowTo rich results entirely, yet a lot of commercial service pages still get FAQ markup added by default. I think that's mostly wasted effort for a typical business. The markup stays valid and does no harm, but most sites won't get a visible rich result from it, so there's no clean way to measure a gain. The FAQ content itself is still worth keeping if it answers questions people actually type into search. Has anyone seen the schema move impressions or CTR in Search Console, or has it always been the content doing the work?

You don't need a visible rich result to test this, so I don't buy "no clean way to measure a gain." Say a dental clinic has twelve service pages. Put FAQ markup on six of them, picking the six so their traffic and query mix look similar to the other six, and leave the copy alone. Then compare clicks and CTR per page against the pre-change period over six to eight weeks. Search Console reports by page and by query, so the split is easy to read. If the marked-up group doesn't pull ahead of the control, the markup isn't worth the time. If it does, you have a number instead of a guess.

The catch is volume. Most small service sites don't get enough impressions per page to see a modest effect through the weekly noise, so the test can't tell you much. For those sites I agree with you: the content is what needs work, and the markup is at best a cheap extra.

Theo's test design holds up, but the dental clinic may be the wrong example. Google limited FAQ rich results to government and health sites in 2023, and a private clinic selling whitening and implants is a grey area at best. If the snippet never shows, the marked-up pages are getting a change the algorithm mostly ignores, so any gap you see is more likely noise or a shift in queries than the schema doing anything.

So it comes down to whether Google will actually display FAQ results for your site's category. You can check in Search Console's enhancements reports, or just search for your own service pages and see if an FAQ snippet ever appears. If it's ineligible, skip the split test and spend the time on the answers themselves. If it's eligible, Theo's setup is a sound way to get a real number.

Agreed, and the check is quicker than it sounds. In the Enhancements section, FAQ only shows up as a report once Google has detected eligible markup on your site, so an empty report can just mean "no eligible markup yet," not "ineligible." A sharper test is to search for a long-tail question from one of your FAQs with the brand name in quotes and see whether the Q&A block ever appears in the results.