Google turned off FAQ results. Your customers' questions still belong on your page.

Google switched off the FAQ box in search last month

Google switched off the FAQ box in search last month. That's the little expandable list of questions Google used to show under some search listings. It stopped appearing on May 7, 2026, and Google is pulling the reports and testing tools for it through the summer. If you added a set of questions to your website years ago just to earn that box, the reason you did it is gone. Do not delete those questions over it. A different reader is using them now, and it pays off more than the box ever did.

That reader is the AI. When one of your customers asks ChatGPT or Google's AI answer a real question, it hunts for a page that already answers that exact question in plain words. Then it reads the answer right off the page and hands it to your customer. If your page has the question and a short answer under it, you're the one it quotes. If your page only shows service names and a phone number, it goes and finds a competitor who wrote the answer down, and names them instead.

This post is about one move, and it's free. Write the real questions your customers ask before they book, put each one on the page with a short plain answer, and you become the page the AI can read. Here's what changed, how the AI actually picks a page, and the steps to do this in an afternoon.

What Google actually did, in plain terms

For years, businesses added a "frequently asked questions" section partly to earn a Google feature. The questions showed up right in the search results as a dropdown a searcher could open. On May 7, 2026, Google turned that display off for everyone. Its own help pages now say FAQ results are no longer showing in Google Search, and that the reports and testing support are going away over the summer (Google's structured-data documentation, reported by Search Engine Journal, May 2026).

One thing is worth being clear about, because it's easy to get wrong. Google did not remove the FAQ code from your site, and it did not break anything. The behind-the-scenes label, sometimes called schema, can stay right where it is. It just won't light up a feature in search anymore. So there's nothing to rip out. The question-and-answer text keeps doing its job.

The job it does now is the part that matters. Google's own guidance on its AI features says there is no special code that gets you in, and that any code you use has to match the words a visitor can actually see. In plain terms: the AI reads the visible answer on your page. There is no shortcut through a plugin. The answer has to be written on the page where a person could read it too.

How ChatGPT and Google's AI answer pick a page

People who study these tools describe the process this way. Say a customer types "does anyone near me do same-day crowns, and about what does it cost" into ChatGPT. The assistant breaks that into a few smaller questions and looks each one up on the web. Then it pulls a short, self-contained answer off the strongest page it finds and reads it back to the customer.

Two details decide whether that page is yours. First, the answer has to be there, written out, close to the question. A page that lists "Services" and "Insurance" gives the assistant nothing to grab. A page with the heading "Do you offer same-day crowns?" and two plain sentences under it hands the assistant a clean answer to quote. Second, the answer has to be real text. The assistant's reader only sees plain words on the page. If your answer is stuck inside a picture, a PDF, or a widget that loads with a script, the assistant reads right past it.

This is the gap on almost every service site. Most sites are built around what the owner sells, so they read like a brochure. The customer is typing a question. The business the assistant names is usually the one whose page asked that question and answered it up top. That is a low bar, and most of your competitors have not cleared it yet.

The fix: put your customers' questions on the page

The work is boring, and that's why it's free. You can do it in one afternoon, using the questions you already answer on the phone every day. It costs nothing but the time.

Start by writing down the 6 to 8 questions a customer asks before they book. For a dental practice, that is usually cost, how soon you can be seen, whether you take a certain insurance, whether you handle a specific problem like a cracked tooth, and whether you are open on weekends. Write each question in the customer's own words, the plain way they would say it out loud.

Then answer each question in two or three plain sentences, right under it, in visible text on the page. Give one real detail where you can, like a price range or a timeframe. A page that says "A same-day crown runs about $950 to $1,400 depending on the material" is far easier for the assistant to quote than "pricing available on request." Research out of Princeton on how these AI answers pick their sources found that adding a clear, concrete detail to a passage made engines pull it into the answer more often. Keep the numbers loose, but the lesson holds: a specific answer beats a vague one.

Last, keep the answers out of images and PDFs. There is a quick test for this. Go to your page and try to select the answer text with your cursor, the way you would to copy it. If it selects, the assistant can read it. If it will not select, it is probably stuck inside a picture, so move it onto the page as real words.

What to do this week

The FAQ news is really a nudge to write your customers' questions down where the AI can read them. Pick one afternoon. List the 6 to 8 questions, answer each in a few plain sentences on the page, and make sure the text is selectable.

Then test it with your own phone. Type your top question into ChatGPT and into Google, and see who comes up. If it is a competitor, you now know the assignment. The owners who write these answers down this month will be the ones the AI names, while everyone else deletes their questions and disappears from the answer for good.