Yes, they matter, and the timing of this question is good. Google fully deprecated FAQ rich results on May 7, 2026, after restricting them to government and health sites back in August 2023. The visible dropdown is gone for everyone now. The reason to keep writing FAQs is that the display and the content were never the same thing.

Start with what actually died. The rich result was a layout feature, and for most stores it had been invisible since 2023 anyway. A SearchPilot split test found that removing valid FAQ schema had no measurable effect on traffic, which proves the markup itself was not doing the work. The words were.

Now look at where those words go today. Question and answer pairs are the most liftable format on the web, because each one is a complete, self-contained response. AI Overviews and chat assistants pull exactly that shape, and direct answers are what earns citations. People Also Ask, which your FAQ questions feed, still shows on about 65 percent of searches and is the one feature that survives next to AI Overviews. So the FAQ format lost one small display and kept its three biggest jobs.

There is also a quiet fourth job. FAQPage remains a valid schema type, and the markup is still read by Bingbot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers, while Google says unused markup causes no harm. Keep it if you have it, and stop expecting anything visible from it.

What changes is how you should write them. The old game rewarded stuffing generic FAQ blocks on every page, which is part of why Google killed the feature. The new game rewards substance. Use the questions your customers actually ask, in their own words. Put the answer in the first sentence, then add two more sentences of detail. Place the block after the main content, and keep it to four to eight questions, because depth and clarity are what decide whether a machine quotes you.

There is one more payoff that has nothing to do with search. An FAQ that answers real objections keeps a buyer on the page at the exact moment they would leave to check something. That job existed before rich results and outlives them.

The short version: the badge is gone, the format won. Write fewer, better FAQs from real questions, keep the markup, and let the answers do their work in People Also Ask, in AI citations, and on the page itself.