FAQ schema on service pages after the rich result cut: keep the markup or drop it?

Google limited FAQ rich results to well-known government and health sites in 2023, so for most small business sites the expandable snippet is gone. Some people keep the FAQPage markup anyway, saying the questions still help machines understand the page and it costs nothing. I don't buy that. If the JSON-LD doesn't match the visible text exactly, you're inviting a mismatch problem, and a service page that only needs to rank for a service term doesn't need markup that earns nothing. My view: keep the FAQ content on the page because buyers actually read it, and drop the schema unless you can name a specific feature it powers. Has anyone seen FAQ markup make a difference in AI answer citations?

Mismatch is really a template problem more than a schema problem. If the FAQ block and the JSON-LD come from the same field in your CMS, they can't drift apart, and the markup costs almost nothing to maintain. The trouble starts when someone pastes schema in by hand and edits the copy later.

My rule of thumb for a local service business: keep the FAQ as visible copy, because callers actually ask those questions (is there an after-hours call-out fee, do you cover my postcode, what's included in a boiler service). Add the markup only if it's generated from the same source as the visible text. If it's hand-maintained, drop it.

As for AI citations, I'm not convinced the markup is what matters. Answer engines seem to pull passages that answer a question directly in plain text, so the visible copy does most of the work.

Depends on whether each answer stands alone. If it only makes sense after the paragraph above it, it'll likely get skipped with or without the markup, so I'd rewrite the answers before deciding on schema.

Jun's right about the standalone answers. What really decides it is whether your CMS generates the markup from the same field as the visible FAQ. If it does, keeping the schema costs you nothing. If someone has to hand-paste it, I'd drop it, because it'll drift out of sync with the page sooner or later.

I don't buy the "if it's hand-maintained, drop it" rule. Drift happens when someone edits the answer and forgets the JSON, and that's a habit problem you can fix with a simple rule: whoever changes an answer updates the schema in the same edit. On a service page with five or six questions, that takes a couple of minutes. Markup generated from the same field is cleaner, sure, but most small business sites don't have that setup, so calling hand-made markup useless throws out something that works fine for them.

Agreed on the habit rule, but I'd narrow it to the edits that matter. Cosmetic drift is mostly harmless. The real problem is when someone changes a fact in the visible answer, like the call-out fee going from $60 to $75, and the JSON still says $60. Now the markup contradicts the page on a claim a buyer might act on.

So I'd make the rule specific: any edit that touches a number, price, service area or availability also updates the schema. Then run the URL through the Rich Results Test once after the change. It takes a minute, and it catches the broken comma or unescaped quote that quietly invalidates a whole hand-pasted block, which happens more often than people expect.