Schema That Still Earns Something vs Schema Theatre

Structured data earns you something in exactly two situations: when it makes a page eligible for a rich result Google still shows, and when it helps machines connect what is on your page to a real-world thing (your business, your product, your author). Everything else is theatre: markup added because a plugin offered it or a checklist mentioned it, producing nothing visible and nothing understood.

The list of what still pays has shrunk, and it is worth knowing where it stands before you spend another afternoon in a schema plugin.

What Google retired, and when

Google has been trimming rich results for three years, usually with a note that it is simplifying the results page.

• HowTo rich results were removed in September 2023.
• FAQ rich results were restricted in August 2023 to well-known government and health sites, then stopped appearing for everyone on 7 May 2026. The documentation was deleted in June 2026 and Search Console API support ended in August 2026.
• Course info, estimated salary, learning video, special announcement and vehicle listing were removed from Search, and their documentation deleted, during 2025.
• Practice problem followed in January 2026.
• Dataset markup is now documented as used only by Dataset Search, not Google Search.

If a plugin on your site is still generating FAQPage or HowTo markup, nothing bad happens. Google has said unused structured data does not cause problems and FAQPage remains a valid schema.org type. But it is doing nothing for your Google appearance, and that is the test.

What still produces a rich result

Google's structured data gallery is the authoritative list, and it changes, so check it rather than trusting a blog post, including this one. As of October 2026 the types most businesses can use are:

• Article: for news, sports and blog articles; supports the title and larger image treatments, and carries the datePublished and dateModified that Google's byline date guidance recommends.
• Breadcrumb: the path shown in the result instead of the raw URL. Cheap, reliable, worth having everywhere.
• Organization: logo, legal name, address, contact details and identifiers for knowledge panels and attribution. One instance, on the home page or every page, describing the business accurately.
• Local business: opening hours, ratings, directions and booking actions in the knowledge panel. For businesses with a physical presence this is the one that matters most.
• Product and merchant listing: price, availability and ratings for ecommerce. Google has been adding properties here steadily (category codes and sale-price date ranges in July 2026, for example) because it feeds Shopping as well as Search.
• Review snippet: star ratings, for Product, Local business, Recipe, Movie, Book and Software app. Note the guideline added in July 2026 against fake and undisclosed incentivised reviews.
• Video: title, thumbnail, duration, key moments and live status. Google added a creator property in September 2026.
• Event, Job posting, Recipe, Course list, Software app and the rest of the gallery, each for its own kind of page.
• Q&A and Discussion forum: for pages built around user-submitted questions and threads. Not for your own FAQ page. Google's Q&A guidance is explicit that QAPage is for a single question with user-submitted answers, and explicitly rules out self-written FAQ pages.

Two more that are not rich results but are still useful: Person and ProfilePage for author pages (ProfilePage is a supported feature), and image metadata, which Google now says it reads alongside og:image when choosing thumbnails for Search and Discover.

What structured data does for AI answers

Less than you have probably been told. Google's guide to generative AI features lists "overfocusing on structured data" among the things you can ignore, saying it is not required for generative AI search and there is no special schema.org markup for it. Its AI features page adds one practical instruction: make sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page.

That instruction is the useful part. Markup that mirrors what a reader can see helps systems resolve ambiguity: which "Acme" this is, what the price actually is, who wrote the article. Markup that claims something the page does not show is at best ignored and at worst a trust problem. The value is entity clarity, not a ranking boost, and it is real but modest.

So the sensible position is: use the types that earn rich results for your page type, use Organization and Person to describe real entities, keep all of it consistent with the visible page, and stop there.

The mistakes that get markup ignored

Most structured data in the wild has at least one of these:

• It describes things not on the page. Ratings with no visible reviews, an FAQ in the markup that is not in the content, a product price that differs from the one shown. Google's general guidelines require markup to reflect visible content, and Search Console will flag the mismatch when it can detect it.
• Duplicate or conflicting blocks. A theme emits Organization, an SEO plugin emits a second Organization with a different name, and a third plugin adds LocalBusiness with another address. Pick one source of truth and switch the others off.
• Required properties missing. Each type has required and recommended fields; a Product without offers or an Article without a headline is not eligible for the enhancement. The Rich Results Test will tell you which.
• Wrong type for the content. QAPage on an FAQ. Recipe on a page that mentions food. Article on a product page because the template did it.
• Markup on pages that are noindex or blocked. Harmless, but pointless, and a sign nobody is looking.
• Stale dates. dateModified bumped on every save, or never updated at all. Google asks that structured dates match the visible dates and reflect genuine updates.

How to audit your own site in an hour

1. Pull three or four representative URLs per template: home, a service or product page, an article, a location page.
2. Run each through the Rich Results Test. Note which types it detects, which are eligible, and every error and warning.
3. Open the Enhancements section in Search Console. Each report is one rich result type; the valid and invalid counts tell you how the whole site is doing for that type.
4. Compare the detected types to the gallery. Anything not in the gallery is theatre for Google purposes. Decide whether to keep it for other reasons (Bing uses some types Google does not) or remove it to reduce clutter.
5. For each type that is eligible, check the markup against the visible page by hand. Same name, same price, same dates, same author.
6. Fix the errors on the templates, not page by page. Most problems are one line in a theme or plugin setting.

Then leave it alone until something changes: a new template, a new product type, or a change in the gallery.

Questions people ask

Should I remove FAQPage markup now that the rich result is gone?

You can leave it or remove it; Google says either is fine for Search. Removing it is tidier and avoids the impression, internally, that it is doing something. Keep the visible FAQ content if readers find it useful; that was always the part that mattered.

Does schema help me show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity?

Not in any documented way. Those assistants read the page text. Clear headings, a direct answer and consistent business details across the web do more than any markup. Where markup helps is indirectly: a correct Organization and LocalBusiness record keeps your name, address and category consistent in the sources those systems draw on.

Is JSON-LD better than microdata?

Google recommends JSON-LD and it is far easier to maintain because it lives in one block rather than scattered through the HTML. If your theme uses microdata and it validates, there is no urgent reason to convert, but new markup should be JSON-LD.

Keeping it current

The gallery changes a few times a year and the retirements tend to arrive with a few months' notice in Google's documentation changelog. Watching that, validating templates after site changes and keeping markup honest with the visible page is part of the monthly technical audit on Ranked SEO projects. If you would like someone to run the hour-long audit above on your site and tell you what is theatre, get in touch.