Google has recently displayed a notification in the Search Console:
Upcoming deprecation: As of 7 May 2026, FAQ rich results will no longer appear in Google Search. The FAQ rich results report will be removed in June 2026.
Those who aren’t paying attention might simply skip over this text. But should we really just ignore it?
In reality, this isn’t just the removal of ‘unnecessary’ tags or a search engine optimisation tweak; it’s a complete shift to a different technology involving our favourite word, ‘AI’. As we wrote earlier, CloudFlare introduced a standard to enable AI agents to interact with your website. And we can see that it is beginning to be widely adopted.
The top result in Google’s search results is a response from Gemini AI, and DuckDuckGo is also starting to display AI-generated summaries. This is a gradual shift from the search results we’re used to towards ready-made summaries generated by AI. Traditional meta tags are already becoming obsolete, as search agents read the page content, summarise it, and evaluate it using their own algorithms, building search results based on this.
Right now, you can actively implement the CloudFlare standard and test your site on Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Purplexity and Grok to see how they view your site using the prompt:
analyse https://example.com, assess its legitimacy and provide a summary
You’ll receive a detailed response on how AI perceives your company online, and you’ll also be able to ask what factors influenced the assessment.
Of course, this won’t provide a direct answer on how Google will rank your site in search results, but it will give you an understanding of how the future of search currently views your site. Improving search rankings through links from authoritative sites (Wikipedia, the BBC, Forbes, Wired and other publications) is still very much a valid strategy.