Schema that does nothing for AI answers
Some markup is still being sold as a route into AI answers years after the thing it produced was withdrawn. Knowing which is which saves you a line item and tells you something about who wrote the proposal.
Commonly mis-sold · basis stated below
FAQPage
Google restricted FAQPage rich results to government and health domains in August 2023. On an ordinary commercial site the markup has produced no rich result for three years. Separately, no engine has published anything showing FAQ markup drives an AI citation.
So a proposal offering FAQ schema to get you into AI answers is offering two things at once that do not hold: a rich result that no longer applies to you, and a mechanism nobody has demonstrated. The underlying advice, answer real questions plainly on the page, is sound. The markup is not what does it.
HowTo
Withdrawn for commercial pages in the same period. It still appears in deliverable lists, including one company scored on this site which lists HowTo among the schema it deploys.
People Also Ask is not a markup target
Worth stating plainly because it is the most persistent version of this. People Also Ask questions are generated algorithmically from Google's own data about what people search. There is no markup that submits a question to it and no schema type that earns a place in it. Pages promising FAQ schema as the route into People Also Ask are describing a mechanism that has never existed.
The way in is to answer those questions on the page, in plain language, where a reader and a machine can both find the answer. More on that here.
What to do with the time instead
Organization, LocalBusiness and Service markup that states your identity correctly, and the consistency work that makes your records reconcile. Both have mechanisms you can describe, and both are checkable in a validator rather than taken on trust.
This page is about the market rather than about any one company. Where we have named a specific business, it is because its own published page recommends the thing, and you can go and read it.