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A Brief History of Google Killing Display Features, and Why You Should Have Seen This Coming

Angie Bergmann

• 6 min read
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A Brief History of Google Killing Display Features, and Why You Should Have Seen This Coming

Google deprecated FAQ rich results last week. The notice landed on May 7, 2026, in a single line on Google's developer documentation: "FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search." The reporting and tooling deprecation rolls out in stages through August. The deprecation itself rolls out across every LinkedIn feed in your industry approximately every fifteen minutes, where it will continue for the next several weeks.

I have been doing SEO for over fifteen years. I've watched this exact movie before. So have you, if you've been paying attention.

Let me save us all some time and walk through the receipts.

The pattern

Google ships a display feature. SEOs spend two to three years building strategies, agency packages, courses, dashboards, and tooling around it. Google deprecates the display. SEOs panic. The cycle repeats.

The structured data, the underlying signal, the actual machine-readable information you provided? That doesn't go anywhere. The display is what Google killed. The data is still being parsed by Google, Bing, AI systems, RAG pipelines, voice assistants, internal site search engines, and anything else built to read the open web in 2026.

But every time, somebody is shocked. Somebody acts betrayed. Somebody writes a post about "the end of structured data" or "schema is dead" or "everything we built was a lie." None of it is true. It has never been true. And we are watching it happen again right now.

The receipts

Here, in roughly chronological order, are display features Google has killed, reduced, or quietly murdered over the past several years.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Launched 2015. Became a requirement for the mobile Top Stories carousel in 2016, which meant publishers had to either adopt AMP or watch their mobile search traffic disappear. Agencies built entire AMP practices. Publishers rebuilt their CMSes around it. In mid-July 2021, Google officially removed the AMP requirement for Top Stories, replacing it with the Page Experience Update and Core Web Vitals. The project effectively died. Sites that had invested heavily in AMP got nothing in return except a maintenance burden they're still carrying.

Indented results and duplicate results. Killed multiple times. Brought back. Killed again. The CTR people who built monitoring around these gave up years ago.

Sitelinks search box. Deprecated November 2024. A small one but real. Sites with proper schema saw the search box disappear from their branded SERP overnight. Schema still valid. Display gone.

FAQ rich results, first phase. August 2023, Google limited FAQ rich results to "well-known, authoritative government and health websites." For everyone else, the dropdown was gone. SEO Twitter mourned for a week. Agencies that had sold "FAQ schema optimization" as a service quietly stopped mentioning it. The data was still in pages. The display was gone for 99% of the web.

HowTo rich results, mobile. Same August 2023 announcement, HowTo was limited to desktop. Most HowTo traffic was mobile. The feature was effectively dead on arrival of that announcement.

HowTo rich results, fully deprecated. September 2023, Google announced that HowTo rich results would no longer appear on desktop either. Fully deprecated. Same pattern. Schema still parsed. Display gone.

Featured snippets, heavy reduction. Not technically a deprecation, but the share of queries returning a featured snippet has dropped dramatically since AI Overviews launched. The featured snippet that used to be the entire SEO strategy for some sites is now a smaller, less reliable surface. Anyone who built their KPIs around featured snippet share has been quietly rewriting their dashboards since 2024.

Practice problem structured data. Deprecation notice added to documentation, support to be removed from Search Console rich result reporting, Rich Results Test, and search appearance filters starting January 2026. Educational sites built around this got the same treatment as everyone else.

Course Info, Learning Video, Special Announcement, Vehicle Listing, Book Actions, and others. Google retired seven structured data features in 2025, including a bunch of types that some sites had built entire content templates around. The Special Announcement schema, originally introduced for COVID-19, got killed when Google decided it was no longer "widely used." Tell that to the public health teams who had built workflows around it.

Video rich results, heavily reduced. Around 2023, Google dramatically reduced when and where video rich results appeared in standard SERPs. Most surface area now goes to YouTube specifically. Sites that hosted their own video and got rich results lost that visibility almost entirely.

FAQ rich results, fully gone. May 7, 2026. The end. Even the government and health sites that retained the feature after 2023 lost it. The full timeline: rich result display gone immediately, Search Console reporting and Rich Results Test support gone June 2026, Search Console API support gone August 2026.

That's ten. There are more. I left out the ones that affected smaller verticals or that didn't make enough noise to be worth listing.

What it all means

Read those again. Look at the dates. Look at the cadence.

This isn't a series of random product decisions. This is a pattern. Google introduces display features, the SEO industry overcommits, the features get abused, Google removes the display while keeping the data parsing. Every time. The interval is roughly two to three years between launch and deprecation for the average rich result.

If you've been in SEO long enough, you've watched this run at least three times. If you've been in SEO for fifteen years, like I have, you've watched it run probably six or seven times across various feature categories.

The lesson is the same every time. Structure, fundamentals, and quality outlast specific display formats. The schema markup, the well-organized content, the clean technical foundation, the genuine answers to genuine questions, the topical authority, the actual expertise demonstrated on the page. All of that survives every deprecation. None of it depends on whether Google chooses to render a specific display element this quarter.

The people who get burned every cycle are the ones who built their entire strategy around the display. Who promised clients "FAQ rich results = bigger SERP real estate = higher CTR" as a deliverable. Who sold packages, courses, and audits centered on the specific feature. Who staked their professional credibility on the visibility of an accordion dropdown that Google could and did kill on a Thursday.

The people who don't get burned are the ones who treated structured data as what it has always been: a way to make your content machine-readable. Whether the machine in question is Google's SERP renderer, Google's AI Overview pipeline, Perplexity's retrieval system, ChatGPT's web search, or somebody's RAG pipeline scraping the open web. The data is for machines. The display was a temporary bonus.

What to actually do

Since you asked.

1. Don't remove your FAQ schema. Google has explicitly said the schema is still being processed for page understanding even though the rich result display is gone. AI search engines including Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's own AI Overviews continue to parse FAQ markup as part of how they extract Q&A answers from the open web. The work you already did is still doing work. Different work. Quieter work. Still work.

2. Audit your structured data implementations honestly. Not because of the deprecation, but because you should be doing this anyway. Is your FAQ markup actually describing genuine question-and-answer content on the page? Or did someone on your team install a plugin in 2020 that injects FAQ schema into pages that don't have FAQ content? The latter has always been a problem. It's just more obviously a problem now.

3. Export your Search Console FAQ performance data before June 2026. When the reporting goes away, your historical FAQ data goes with it. If you want a record of what the feature did for your traffic during its lifetime, pull the reports now. A 28-day before/after comparison on the pages that previously showed FAQ dropdowns will give you the CTR delta of the May 7 change, which is the only directly measurable impact.

4. Update your automated reporting before August 2026. Search Console API support for FAQ rich result data is gone in August 2026. If your dashboards pull from that endpoint, they will silently start returning nulls. Fix it before that happens.

5. Stop treating any single display feature as a strategy. This is the lesson that keeps re-presenting itself. SEO is not the visibility of any one rich result. SEO is the structured, comprehensive, well-presented, machine-readable signal layer of a website. Some quarters Google will show a feature. Some quarters Google will kill the feature. The strategy is the same either way.

6. Get comfortable with the cycle. The next display feature is already being built. Two years from now, Google will launch something else and SEOs will rush to it. Three to four years after that, Google will deprecate it. The version of this post that someone writes about that deprecation will sound a lot like this one. You can save yourself a panic by knowing this in advance.

The shorter version

If you got broken by the FAQ schema news, you were doing it wrong.

The schema isn't dead. The display is.

The fundamentals didn't change. The leaderboard reshuffled.

The good SEOs are still doing the work. The bad ones are writing eulogies for an accordion.

Welcome to the cycle. It's been running this whole time. You just noticed.

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