Roshanak Kavian
Co-Founder and CEO of Indigo Mars, a Los Angeles marketing agency.
The honest answer is both, serving different purposes, but if a business can only manage one approach, contextual FAQs placed directly on individual service or topic pages tend to outperform a single catch-all FAQ hub for both traditional search and AI citation. A dedicated FAQ page still has real value for broad, cross-cutting questions that don't belong to any one service specifically.
What Each Approach Is Actually Good For
A standalone FAQ page works well for questions that apply across your whole business rather than one specific service — payment methods, general policies, hours, how to get in touch. It's easy to point a customer to directly, and it consolidates broad questions in one predictable place.
Question-and-answer content placed at the bottom of an individual service page works well for questions specific to that exact offering. This tends to help rankings more directly, since the answers stay tightly focused on the same topic as the rest of the page, rather than living somewhere more general.
If You Can Only Do One
Three to five genuinely relevant question-and-answer pairs at the bottom of each service page, addressing the real questions specific to that service, tends to move the needle more than a single generic FAQ hub covering everything at once. The focus itself is the advantage — a page entirely about one topic, including its FAQ section, gives both search engines and AI systems a clearer, more concentrated signal than a broad page trying to answer questions about everything at once.
A Real Update Worth Knowing: Google Deprecated FAQ Rich Results in May 2026
This is worth flagging directly rather than assuming it doesn't matter: Google ended the expandable FAQ dropdown that used to appear directly beneath organic search listings, as of May 7, 2026. FAQPage schema markup itself remains valid, still worth using, and still provides genuine structural clarity — but it no longer produces that specific visual rich result in traditional search.
What This Means Practically
Multiple senior SEO practitioners have noted that Google hasn't tied this deprecation to a corresponding change in AI Overview inclusion, and pages continue to get cited in AI-generated answers with no FAQ schema present at all. The more defensible read: clear, direct, well-structured visible content matters more for AI citation than the specific schema type sitting behind it. FAQ schema is still worth adding for the structural clarity it provides — it's just no longer the guaranteed visual payoff in traditional search it once was, and it was never the primary lever for AI citation to begin with.
Where to Go From Here
This connects directly to the formula covered in How to Write FAQs That AI Search Actually Cites, which remains accurate regardless of this specific rich-result change.
Not sure whether your own FAQ content is structured and placed well? Get in touch and we'll take a look.
