Earlier this week, Google announced changes to HowTo and FAQ-rich results in order to provide a cleaner and more consistent search experience.  The changes are mainly in how types of rich results are shown in Google’s search results. They will reduce the visibility of FAQ-rich results, and limit How-To rich results to desktop devices. 

The changes will primarily affect the use of FAQ and How-To Structured data. 

Going forward, FAQ-rich results will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites, this rich result will no longer be shown regularly. Google suggests not to make changes to this, although will most likely not be visible on search. 

How-To rich results will only be shown for desktop users, and not for users on mobile devices. Note that with mobile indexing, Google indexes the mobile version of a website as the basis for indexing: to have How-To rich results shown on desktop, the mobile version of your website must include the appropriate markup.

Search console will also change for both FAQ and HowTo. Google emphasizes that this should not be considered a ranking change.  We recommend that you keep your rich structured data for other search engines as it doesn’t impact your search ranking.