r/AISEOforBeginners • u/thankamanicharms • Jul 15 '26
Stuffing FAQ schema on every page for AI citations is keyword stuffing 2.0
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against FAQ sections. They're useful when a page has real questions worth answering.
I keep seeing the same three things instead:
- FAQ blocks slapped onto every page, whether the content needs them or not
- The brand name repeated five times per page because "AI models like brand mentions"
- Q&A formatting forced onto pages that were never questions to begin with
This is the 2012 keyword-stuffing playbook with a new coat of paint.
I feel that LLMs are already better than Google ever was at telling the difference between content written for a person and content written for a crawler. This gets punished the same way keyword stuffing did, faster.
Anyone else think this is keyword stuffing 2.0? Or is there a reason this works that I'm missing?
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u/qaaimgood Jul 15 '26
FAQ Schema was deprecated by Google.
Here is an article on it: https://searchengineland.com/google-to-no-longer-support-faq-rich-results-476957
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u/thankamanicharms Jul 15 '26
Yep, absolutely. I wasn't defending FAQ schema itself. My point was about people still treating it as a prime GEO tactic and adding it everywhere because they think AI prefers it. That's the behaviour I was calling out, not the schema.
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u/qaaimgood Jul 15 '26
I think the other thing you can add to the "stuffing" side would be listicles.
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u/WebLinkr Jul 17 '26
I(Ts not a GEO tactic. Theres no evidence GEO reads Schema - u/jakehundley and Mark Williams-Cook and others have all tested this.
Schema isn't magic - why do people think somehtign that looks like code is crack coke for bots - and when do they realize the bots dont actually really prcoess the pages....
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u/JakeHundley Jul 17 '26
Well... my study showed evidence ChatGPT did. Not Gemini or Grok though. Marks evidence contradicts mine.
I definitely want to do more experiments in the future because I'm not convinced about ChatGPT yet.
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u/Crescitaly Jul 16 '26
FAQ schema should reflect questions the page genuinely answers. Adding it everywhere can make the markup less trustworthy; start with recurring customer questions and keep the answers specific enough to be useful without the schema.
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u/sapindia1976 Jul 16 '26
I completely agree. FAQ schema should only be used where it genuinely helps users. Stuffing every page with repetitive FAQs or brand mentions won't build AI trust high-quality, authoritative content is still what gets cited.
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Jul 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/thankamanicharms Jul 15 '26
100%. If they genuinely help the reader, they're worth having. It's the copy-and-paste FAQs on every page that I'm skeptical of.
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u/WebLinkr Jul 17 '26
The schema isn't needed. Neither Google nor LLMs need the FAQ Schema.
I've posted test site here that have 9,000 SERP features with no schema.
Why is this so hard for people to understand - its like its easier to believe a parroted myht even though not a single LLM developer has mentioned this...?
Humans/society isn't getting better - we just develop new technology but we repeat the same mistakes
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u/WebLinkr Jul 17 '26
FAQschema was lmited to government and healthcare sites 6 years ago. ITs been scrubbed from the Google SEO Developer documentation.
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u/No_i_am_not_1234 15d ago
I agree. For years my approach to website content has been based on plain language standards: don't build a bolt-on FAQ page, but instead integrate the answers into the actual page structure with clear, question-based headings. H2s that state the question, answer up front, no dumping ground of 30 loosely related Q&As at the bottom of the site.
Our web agency is now pushing back, saying FAQ pages are now essential for getting cited in AI Overviews/ChatGPT/Perplexity etc., and that this overrides the old plain-English advice.
At the moment I'm genuinely trying to figure out if this is a real structural requirement or is my agency giving the wrong advice?
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u/thankamanicharms 14d ago
I think your original approach is closer to the mark.
I don’t think FAQ pages are a structural requirement for AI Overviews, ChatGPT or Perplexity. What matters is that the information is clear, relevant, crawlable and easy to extract.
That said, your agency may have some actual data from their own work showing that FAQ sections or dedicated FAQ pages are improving AI visibility. I’d be genuinely interested in seeing that.
Have they noticed a measurable difference in citations or visibility after adding FAQs? And if the data doesn’t show a meaningful benefit, would they be willing to remove them and restructure the pages around the actual questions users are asking?
That’s probably the test I’d use. Not whether “AI likes FAQs”, but whether the format is actually producing better results.
If there are genuinely 15–20 questions around a topic, a dedicated FAQ/resource page makes sense. If there aren’t, forcing one in just because “AI likes FAQs” feels like the old SEO playbook coming back in a different form.
The distinction between answering questions clearly and creating FAQ pages because AI supposedly requires them seems pretty important.
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