FAQ and HowTo Schema for Law Firm Pages After the Rich-Result Changes

For years, FAQ and HowTo schema were the easiest wins in a law firm SEO playbook. You added a block of questions to a practice-area page, wrapped them in structured data, and watched your listing balloon into a stack of expandable answers that pushed competitors down the page. That era is over, and a lot of law firm sites are still marking up pages for a search feature that no longer shows.

If your agency or in-house team is still promising FAQ rich results on your service pages, that promise is out of date. This guide walks through exactly what Google changed, why it changed, where FAQ and HowTo markup still does real work, and how to handle these schema types on attorney pages without wasting effort or introducing risk.

What Google actually changed in 2023

In August 2023, Google announced two changes to structured data that most law firm marketers never absorbed. The changes were framed as a reduction to “reduce clutter” in search results, and they landed with almost no fanfare relative to how much they altered the value of these schema types.

First, FAQ rich results were restricted to a narrow set of sites. Google said the expandable FAQ display would only be shown for what it called well-known, authoritative government and health websites. Every other site, including law firm sites, would generally no longer see the FAQ rich result in the search listing, even with valid FAQPage markup on the page.

Second, HowTo rich results were cut back to desktop only and then effectively retired. Google reduced HowTo display, removed the reporting for it in Search Console, and pulled the HowTo documentation from its structured data guidance. In practice, HowTo rich results no longer appear for ordinary sites. The markup is still technically valid JSON-LD, but it earns nothing in the search interface.

The blunt takeaway is this. A personal injury firm, a criminal defense practice, or a family law office can add textbook-perfect FAQPage or HowTo schema today and get no special SERP treatment from it. The rich result you were optimizing for is gone for your category of site.

Why Google pulled the feature back

The change was not arbitrary. FAQ markup got abused hard. Businesses stuffed pages with questions they never intended a user to ask, purely to grab more vertical real estate in the results. When a single listing occupies four or five lines of expandable Q&A, it crowds out other results and degrades the experience Google is trying to protect. Reducing FAQ display to health and government sources was Google’s way of keeping the feature where it adds public value and killing it where it had become a spam vector.

HowTo faced a similar problem plus a relevance issue. The step-by-step format made sense for recipes and repair guides, but it was thin on most sites and rarely useful on mobile, where the majority of legal searches happen. Rather than police it, Google removed it.

Understanding the motive matters because it tells you where the ground is heading. Google is steadily narrowing which structured data types produce visible SERP features, and it is doing so around one question. Does this markup describe something a searcher genuinely benefits from seeing surfaced, or is it a lever businesses pull to game the layout? Any tactic that fails that test is on borrowed time.

Where FAQ schema still earns something

Here is the nuance that most rushed advice gets wrong. FAQ markup being ignored for rich results does not mean it is worthless. It means the value moved.

Structured data is a machine-readable description of your page content, written in a standard format called JSON-LD, which is a formal W3C recommendation you can read in the W3C JSON-LD 1.1 specification. That description does not stop being useful just because one display feature was switched off. A few places FAQ markup still pulls weight for a law firm site:

• Entity and topic clarity. Clean structured data helps search engines and AI systems parse what your page covers and how the questions relate to your practice area. It reinforces the topical signals your content already sends.
• Consumption by non-search surfaces. Assistants, aggregators, and other tools read structured data outside of the classic blue-link results. Marking up your content keeps it legible to systems you do not control and cannot see.
• Future optionality. Google has reversed course before. Keeping valid, honest FAQ markup on pages that genuinely answer questions costs little and leaves you positioned if display rules loosen again.

What FAQ schema does not do anymore is generate the expandable listing, and it is not a required ingredient for appearing in AI Overviews or the People Also Ask box. Google has been explicit that those surfaces read your page content directly and do not depend on FAQ markup to pull an answer. So the honest framing for a law firm is that well-written question-and-answer content is the asset, and the markup is a light supporting layer, not the thing that wins visibility.

What to do with HowTo markup now

HowTo is simpler to reason about because there is no ambiguity left. The rich result is gone, Search Console no longer reports on it, and Google removed the supporting documentation. If your law firm pages carry HowTo schema, it is doing nothing for you in search.

You do not need to rip it out in a panic. Invalid or misleading markup can be a liability, but dormant valid markup is mostly harmless. That said, if you are cleaning up a site or shipping new practice-area pages, there is no reason to add HowTo schema going forward, and removing stale HowTo blocks during a normal content refresh keeps your templates lean. The step-by-step content itself, for example a walkthrough of what to do after a car accident or how a Chapter 7 filing proceeds, is still valuable to readers. Keep the content. Drop the markup type that no longer earns anything.

How to handle FAQ and HowTo schema on your firm’s pages

A practical sequence for auditing and fixing these schema types across a law firm site looks like this.

1. Inventory what you have. Crawl the site or check templates to find every page carrying FAQPage or HowTo markup. Practice-area pages and blog posts are the usual suspects.
2. Keep the content, reassess the markup. The questions and answers on the page still serve users and still feed AI systems that read your copy. Do not delete good Q&A content. Only reconsider the structured data wrapper.
3. Retire HowTo markup on new work. Stop shipping HowTo schema. Remove it during routine updates rather than launching an emergency project.
4. Validate anything you keep. Run remaining FAQ markup through the Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator so that whatever stays on the page is error-free and honest to the visible content.
5. Redirect the effort. Move the energy you spent chasing FAQ rich results toward schema types that still produce features and toward the on-page substance that AI answers and rankings actually reward.

That last point is where firms recover the most value. The hours once spent gaming FAQ display are better invested in LegalService, Attorney, and LocalBusiness markup that still supports how Google understands a law firm, and in the depth of your practice-area content itself. Our breakdown of on-page SEO for attorney practice-area pages covers how to build that substance so your questions are answered inside strong, rankable content rather than bolted on for a feature that no longer fires.

Common questions about FAQ and HowTo schema for law firms

The rule changes left a lot of firms unsure about what to keep and what to cut. Here are the questions we field most often.

Should I remove all FAQ schema from my law firm site

No. There is no penalty for keeping valid FAQPage markup that honestly reflects visible page content. It will not produce a rich result for a law firm, but it stays useful as a clean, machine-readable description of your Q&A content. Remove FAQ markup only if it is invalid, hidden from users, or misrepresenting the page.

Will FAQ schema help me show up in AI Overviews

Not directly. Google reads the content on your page to build AI Overviews and does not require FAQ markup to do it. Well-structured, genuinely helpful question-and-answer content is what gets pulled. The markup is a light supporting signal, not the mechanism. Write for the reader and the answer engine first, then add markup as a clean layer on top.

Is it against the rules to keep HowTo markup

It is not against the rules, it just does nothing in search anymore. Google retired the HowTo rich result and stopped reporting on it. Dormant valid HowTo markup is mostly harmless, but there is no reason to add it to new pages, and clearing it during normal maintenance keeps your templates clean.

What schema should a law firm use instead

Focus on the structured data types that still support how Google understands a law practice, such as LegalService, Attorney, LocalBusiness, and Organization markup, plus Article or BlogPosting on your content. These describe your firm, your people, and your locations in ways that reinforce entity signals and local relevance, which is where the durable value sits now.

Did this change hurt my rankings

The change removed a display feature, not a ranking factor. FAQ and HowTo rich results were never a ranking boost, they were visual real estate in the listing. Losing them can reduce click-through on pages that leaned on the expanded display, but your underlying rankings are unaffected by the schema change itself. If traffic dipped, the fix is stronger content and better titles, not chasing a retired feature.

How Cube30 treats schema on law firm pages

Structured data is a supporting layer in our system, never the strategy. The Cube30 method treats schema as one facet of a page that has to earn rankings on substance first, then gets described cleanly to machines. We do not sell FAQ rich results, because they no longer exist for law firm sites, and we do not build practice-area pages around a SERP feature that Google can switch off without warning. You can see how the framework fits together in our overview of the Cube30 method for law firm SEO.

In practice that means we keep the question-and-answer content that clients and answer engines actually use, we mark up firms, attorneys, and locations with the schema types that still carry weight, and we retire the markup that Google has quietly deprecated. It is unglamorous, but it is the difference between a site built on durable signals and one propped up by a feature that already went away once. If you want that discipline applied across your whole footprint, our law firm SEO agency work builds it into every page rather than treating schema as an afterthought.

Where this leaves your firm

The FAQ and HowTo rich-result changes are a useful reminder that display features come and go, but strong content and clean entity signals endure. Chasing the next expandable listing is a losing game. Building practice-area pages that genuinely answer the questions your future clients are typing, and describing them accurately to search engines, is the position that survives every algorithm and layout shift Google ships.

If your law firm site is still marked up for features that no longer show, or you are not sure what your schema is actually doing, that is exactly the kind of gap a proper audit surfaces. Book a strategy call with Rubiks Technology and we will show you where your structured data helps, where it is wasted effort, and how to turn your practice-area pages into assets that earn visibility on their own merit.