Every Google Rich Result Retired Since 2023 (Full List)

Since 2023, Google has retired ten structured-data rich results, restricted one to a narrow set of publishers before killing it entirely, and pulled a display element off mobile devices while keeping it on desktop. If you're trying to figure out which of your schema markup still does anything visible in Google Search, here's the complete, dated answer: HowTo, FAQ, Sitelinks Search Box, Book Actions, Course Info, Claim Review, Estimated Salary, Learning Video, Special Announcement, Vehicle Listing, and Practice Problem are all gone as of this writing. None of these removals penalized rankings. All of them removed a visual SERP feature.

This page is a single, maintained reference: one retirement per entry, with the exact date, what it looked like, why Google says it was cut, and what to do with your existing markup. If a guide you're reading recommends FAQ or HowTo schema for a rich result, this list is how you check whether it's current.

Why does this list matter?

Because structured-data guidance goes stale fast, and stale guidance costs you real effort. Google has retired more rich results in the last three years than in the entire decade before it: four separate rounds of cuts, most of them still-active traps for anyone following an undated tutorial. Recommending FAQPage schema for a "rich snippet" in 2026 isn't a stylistic choice; it's describing a feature that no longer exists. Knowing exactly what's gone, and when, is how you avoid wasting implementation time on a display that will never render, and how you catch when a guide you're reading was written before a cut you should know about.

One thing to hold onto through all of this: Google has stated repeatedly that these are search-appearance changes, not ranking changes. Removing a rich-result display doesn't demote your page, and leaving the deprecated markup in place doesn't trigger errors or penalties. The cost of an outdated rich-result implementation isn't a penalty, it's wasted effort and stale expectations. This list exists to fix the second problem.

The full list: every retirement, in order

HowTo, retired August 2023

What it was: A step-by-step visual result showing numbered instructions, sometimes with images, directly in the SERP for how-to content.

What happened: Google removed HowTo rich results from both mobile and desktop search in August 2023, and pulled the HowTo structured data documentation and case study from Search Central shortly after. It was one of the earliest signals of the broader simplification pattern that's continued since.

What to do: HowTo markup left on your pages doesn't cause errors, it's simply inert. If your content is genuinely instructional, keep the step-by-step structure for readers and for AI extraction (clear, numbered steps are exactly what a model lifts when someone asks "how do I..."), but don't expect or design around a visual result that hasn't existed since 2023.

FAQ, restricted August 2023, fully retired May 7, 2026

What it was: An expandable question-and-answer dropdown shown directly under a search result, letting a page occupy significantly more SERP real estate.

What happened, in two stages:

• August 2023: Google restricted FAQ rich results to "well-known, authoritative government and health websites," cutting off the vast majority of commercial and content sites that had used it. This is the update a lot of guides still haven't caught up with.
• May 7, 2026: Google removed FAQ rich results entirely, including the narrow government-and-health exception that survived 2023. As of this date, no site, regardless of authority or vertical, gets the FAQ dropdown. Google is winding the rest of the feature down in stages: the FAQ search-appearance filter and the Rich Results Test support for FAQ markup are scheduled to go in June 2026, and Search Console API support for FAQ follows in August 2026.

What to do: If a guide published after May 2026 still promises "FAQ rich results," including one aimed specifically at health or government sites, where the old exception used to apply, it's out of date. Our own dental and medical schema guide covers exactly this trap for healthcare content, where the old health-site exception makes outdated advice especially persistent. Real FAQ content, genuine questions your visitors actually ask, answered clearly, is still worth writing, for readers and for AI extraction. Just don't implement FAQPage schema expecting a Google rich result; that door is closed for every site now. We cover the full myth-vs-reality breakdown in Is FAQ Schema Dead in 2026? if you want the deeper dive.

Sitelinks Search Box, retired November 21, 2024

What it was: A search field embedded directly beneath a top-ranking result for well-known sites, letting someone search within that site without clicking through first, powered by WebSite schema with a SearchAction.

What happened: Google announced the retirement on October 21, 2024, citing declining usage, and removed the visual element globally across all languages and regions on November 21, 2024. This didn't affect regular sitelinks, the grouped links under a result, only the search-box element itself. Google also removed the corresponding Search Console report and the Rich Results Test highlight for it.

What to do: No action required. Google explicitly said there's no need to remove the SearchAction markup, it simply does nothing now. If you're cleaning up your WebSite schema anyway, you can drop the potentialAction block while keeping the rest of your WebSite/Organization data intact, since that continues to support how Google reads your brand as an entity.

The June 2025 batch: seven types retired together

What it was: On June 12, 2025, Google announced it was retiring seven structured-data-driven displays in one coordinated move, framed explicitly as a simplification effort: "we've identified some features that aren't being used very often and aren't adding significant value to users."

The seven:

• Book Actions, "buy" or "preview" action buttons attached to book listings
• Course Info, course details (provider, format, duration, pricing) shown directly in results for e-learning platforms
• Claim Review, fact-check verdict snippets used by fact-checking organizations
• Estimated Salary, salary-range displays for job listings
• Learning Video, enhanced context for educational video results
• Special Announcement, the urgent-alert box that became common during the pandemic
• Vehicle Listing, enriched car listings with specs and pricing for dealerships

What happened next: Google removed these from Search Console rich-result reporting, the Rich Results Test, and the relevant search-appearance filters starting September 9, 2025. Bulk data-export users saw the deprecated search-appearance fields report as NULL starting October 1, 2025, and Search Console API support for these types continued only through December 2025.

What to do: If your site used any of these, course platforms, job boards, auto dealers, and fact-checkers were the most affected, the visual result is gone, but Google has been consistent that this doesn't touch rankings. For course content specifically, the underlying Course type and its properties still describe your content accurately for AI systems even without the old rich-result display, so there's still value in keeping (or adding) the structured data; it just isn't earning a SERP visual anymore. See our Course schema guide for the current implementation.

Practice Problem, announced November 2025, support removed January 2026

What it was: A rich result surfacing individual practice problems (math, science) for educational content, letting students find worked examples directly in search.

What happened: Google confirmed the retirement in a November 2025 documentation update as part of continued "underused or limited value" cleanup, following the same pattern as the June 2025 batch. Search Console and API support for Practice Problem structured data ended starting January 2026.

What to do: Same guidance as the June 2025 batch: no penalty, no urgency to strip the markup, but don't build new implementation time around a display that no longer renders.

A partial case worth knowing: Breadcrumbs on mobile (not a full retirement)

This one doesn't belong in the "retired" list above, but it trips people up enough that it's worth a clear, separate note. On January 23, 2025, Google stopped showing the breadcrumb trail in the visible URL on mobile search results, replacing it with just the domain name. Desktop breadcrumbs were explicitly unaffected: they still display, the Breadcrumb Rich Result Report in Search Console still runs, and the Rich Results Test still validates BreadcrumbList markup normally. Google was direct that there's nothing you need to change if you use breadcrumb markup. Treat this as a platform-specific display change, not a deprecation. BreadcrumbList remains a fully supported, actively useful type, covered in our breadcrumb schema guide.

A quick note on Dataset structured data

Google also clarified in its November 2025 documentation update that Dataset structured data is intended specifically for Google's Dataset Search product, not for features in regular Google Search results. This is a scope clarification rather than a retirement: if you publish genuine datasets, the markup still does its job for Dataset Search, but it's worth knowing so you don't expect a regular-Search display from it.

Why does Google keep doing this?

Google's own framing across every announcement in this list has been consistent: these are underused features being cut to keep the results page focused on what people actually engage with, not a retreat from structured data generally. Types that remain widely used and genuinely helpful, Product, Review/AggregateRating, Recipe, Event, Article, Organization, LocalBusiness, and BreadcrumbList among them, haven't been touched, and Google has continued adding new structured-data support elsewhere (loyalty programs, return policies, and more) even while trimming these ten.

There's a broader pattern worth naming honestly, though it's an inference rather than something Google has stated outright: every one of these retirements removed a feature that gave third-party content extra visual real estate on the results page, at the same time Google has been expanding its own AI Overview and AI Mode surfaces. That's a defensible read of the direction of travel, but it's our interpretation of the pattern, not a claim Google has made. Treat it as context, not as an official rationale.

What this means for your structured-data strategy

A few practical takeaways that apply across the whole list:

Don't panic-remove deprecated markup. In every single announcement, Google has said explicitly that leaving old structured data in place doesn't cause errors or ranking harm. Removal is optional cleanup, not a fix for anything broken.

Do stop building new work around retired types. If you're planning a content project specifically to earn a HowTo, FAQ, Course Info, or any other type on this list, redirect that effort, the display doesn't exist anymore, regardless of how well you implement the markup.

Re-verify anything you learned more than a year ago. Given four separate rounds of retirement since 2023, any schema advice without a visible date, or without a cross-check against Google's current structured data gallery, may be describing a feature that's gone. This is the single most common way outdated guidance costs people implementation time. Our own schema types and rich results guide tracks which types currently carry a live rich result.

Separate "rich result" value from "AI legibility" value. This is the most important shift underneath this whole list. A rich result is a visual display Google grants at its discretion. Structured data's other job, describing your content in machine-readable terms so AI systems can understand and extract it accurately, doesn't depend on Google's rich-result feature list at all. FAQPage schema losing its dropdown doesn't make well-structured Q&A content less useful to ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews; it just means you're no longer chasing a SERP visual with it. That distinction is why entity-first, content-accurate schema still matters even as individual rich results come and go, the markup keeps doing AI-legibility work long after the visual feature attached to it is retired. See our guide on getting cited by ChatGPT for what that legibility work actually looks like in practice.

How AI Schema Gen keeps you current

Tracking ten separate deprecation announcements across three years, each with its own date, its own Search Console timeline, and its own "does this still apply to me" nuance, isn't a reasonable ongoing task for a busy site owner, and it's exactly the kind of thing that causes schema advice to drift stale. AI Schema Gen generates your markup from your actual page content rather than from a fixed template library, covering 827+ schema types, which means it's built around the types that are genuinely supported now rather than perpetuating a type Google retired two rounds ago. And because the product's real focus is your entity profile, your organization, your people, your topics, connected and scored across Core Identity, External Validation, and Topical Authority, the value it builds doesn't evaporate when a single rich-result display goes away. An entity profile keeps making you legible to AI search regardless of which specific SERP features are currently in fashion.

If you're auditing your existing markup against this list, that's exactly the kind of cleanup pass worth doing with a tool that regenerates from your live content rather than a static block someone wrote in 2023 and never revisited.

Validating what's still active on your site

Check the current structured data documentation before investing implementation time in any type: it's the authoritative, current list of what's actually supported.

Run your key pages through the Rich Results Test to confirm which types it recognizes today. If a type you've implemented doesn't show a result and isn't flagged as an error either, that's often a sign it's a retired type rather than a broken one, check this list to confirm.

Watch Search Console's Search appearance filters. When a type is retired, its filter disappears from the sidebar over the following months, which is a reliable secondary signal alongside the announcement dates above.

Bookmark Google's Search Central changelog at developers.google.com/search/updates. Every retirement in this list traces back to an entry there, and it's where the next one will appear first, usually well before any third-party coverage catches up.

Keeping schema current across retirements, additions, and tooling changes isn't a one-person job. AI Schema Gen generates markup from your live content around what's actually supported today, and builds the entity profile that keeps you legible to AI search regardless of which rich results come and go.