Traffic from FAQ rich results is reduced almost to 0 from 600+ per day in a span of 10 day

[Suhas BV]

On my website, I was getting 600+ clicks everyday from FAQ rich results. I was seeing this on google search console -> search appearance. But after Feb 15th, the traffic reduced drastically from FAQ rich results. and in 7 8 days, it reduced to less than 10 per day. I am not sure what the issue is. Please let me know what the issue could be.

 

[Ryuzaki]

There is such a thing as a snippet penalty when you've been seen to misuse rich snippet markup in ways not intended or if your markup is broken too much. That may or may not be you. An example is people using the review stars that show in the SERPs for pages that don't have any user reviews on them. It's not for assigning your own rating to a product, but to curate the ratings of submitted reviews by others.

What has most likely happened is you were affected by an algorithm update. Almost everything has their exposure controlled by algorithms now, like snippet surfacing, Google Discover traffic. Google News, and so forth. All of these features seem to have their own algos that get updated alongside the main search ones. It comes and goes. Sometimes I'll be crushing it on Discover then get nothing, then get it all back. All these products go like that, including snippets.

 

[Elvis]

Like Ryuzaki said, Google apparently determined that your site should not be displaying the FAQ rich results. You may have misused the markup, you may have been falsely accused of misusing the markup by an algorithm, or it's possible Google is cutting back on the amount of FAQ rich results it is showing for everyone in your SERPs.

I think it was a couple years ago now, everyone and their dog were adding FAQ schema to their pages because of the amount of SERP real estate it took up. It was getting out of control and Google stated that they were going to cut back on the amount they display. So it's possible this is just an evolution of the SERPs and not something you did. In which case, it's a bummer, but you have to look back on it and be happy you got to take advantage of it for a while.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I wonder if this is all them planning to 'make space' for when they insert AI written FAQ into the serps? I can't see them being as subtle as bing and slapping their new chat in the sidebar and just having it be a chatbot, I can see Google being quite aggressive with pregenerated FAQ answers and all sorts just based on their history of stuffing all kinds of things around the 10 blue links as soon as they have the idea.