Google Search stopped showing How-to rich results on desktop yesterday.
Google’s announcement. In an update to an Aug. 8 blog post about the reduction of visibility for HowTo and FAQ results, Google announced:
Why we care. If How-to rich results drove any incremental traffic for you, Google is now taking that all away from you, starting yesterday. And because the result type is now deprecated, that reporting will soon be gone in Google Search Console.
36 days later. Google said the How-To, from HowTo structured data, rich results would only be shown on desktop search results, and no longer on mobile devices, when the changes were announced Aug. 8.
Google added that “with mobile indexing, Google indexes the mobile version of a website as the basis for indexing: to have How-To rich results shown on desktop, the mobile version of your website must include the appropriate markup.”
But now How-To rich results are gone entirely – from desktop and mobile.
FAQ rich results now gone. FAQ rich results would “only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites,” Google also announced last month. That reduction finally started yesterday as well.
As Barry Schwartz reported in Google FAQ Rich Results Now Only Displayed For Authoritative Sites on Search Engine Roundtable:
- “FAQs in the Google search results are now barely showing up in the search results anymore. If you look at the tracking tools, they show a huge drop in how often the FAQ rich results are showing in the Google search results.”
Here’s a screenshot SEO consultant Brodie Clark shared on X:
