FAQ Schema Generator

What FAQ schema is, and what changed in 2023

FAQ schema is a block of code, invisible to visitors, that labels the questions and answers on your page. To a search engine, a heading followed by a paragraph is just a heading followed by a paragraph. This markup says: that heading is a question, and this paragraph is its answer.

The honest answer on value has changed. Until 2023 this markup got you an expandable accordion under your search result, and everyone added it for that reason. Google then restricted those rich results to government and health sites, and most sites lost the visual payoff overnight.

The rules FAQPage markup has to follow

FAQPage is a small schema with a short list of constraints, and the ones that get sites in trouble are about honesty rather than syntax.

This tool enforces the HTML rule automatically as it builds the JSON. The rest are editorial decisions no generator can make for you.

How to write FAQ content that actually gets used

The markup is the easy part. What decides whether an assistant quotes you is how the answers are written.

1. 01

   Write the questions the way people ask them

   Use the phrasing a person would type or say, not the phrasing an internal document would use. "How much does it cost?" beats "Pricing information", because the markup exists to match a question to an answer.

2. 02

   Answer in the first sentence

   The answers that get lifted into AI Overviews and assistant responses commit immediately and then add context. An answer that warms up for three lines before saying anything is not quotable.

3. 03

   Keep each answer short and self-contained

   Around fifty words is a good target. The answer has to make sense on its own, away from the page, because that is exactly how it will be used.

4. 04

   Put the same questions on the page, visibly

   Structured data must describe content a visitor can see. Questions that exist only in the markup, or that sit behind a tab which never opens, violate Google's guidelines and can earn a manual action.

5. 05

   Use FAQPage only where the page really answers questions

   Support articles, pricing pages, product pages, service pages. Bolting a generic FAQ block onto every page to farm markup is a pattern spam systems look for, and it makes the page worse for readers.

6. 06

   Paste the block in and validate it

   It goes anywhere in the head or body. Check afterwards that your CMS has not also emitted its own FAQPage block, because two on one page is a conflict rather than twice the coverage.

What makes an answer quotable

Every system that lifts an answer has the same constraint: it has to work when separated from the page it came from. That single requirement explains most of what distinguishes an answer that gets used from one that does not.

Commit in the first sentence

"Meta descriptions should be 150 to 160 characters" is liftable. "There are a few things to consider when thinking about description length" is not, because the sentence carries no information.

Include the number

Specifics survive extraction and generalities do not. A price, a character count, a date, a version number: these are the things a reader wanted and the things an assistant can check against other sources.

Do not depend on the surrounding page

An answer that begins "As mentioned above" or ends "see the table below" breaks the moment it is quoted. Write each one as if it were the only thing anybody would read.

• One question, one answer, no hedging
• Around fifty words, and rarely more than eighty
• The question phrased the way somebody would actually ask it
• No pronouns referring to things outside the answer
• At most one link, and the answer still works without it

What this tool generates

Frequently asked questions