Not everything needs to be a question: are you overusing FAQs on landing pages? – Browser Media

FAQs provide a great way to answer questions about what you offer – but only where they make sense. By  , published on Somewhere in the last couple of years, a lot of landing pages stopped being landing pages and became glorified FAQ pages with a hero banner plopped on top.You’ve probably noticed it, too. A landing page with two lines of intro, a CTA, and then 15 to 25 collapsed accordions doing all the heavy lifting. “What is X?” “How does X work?” “Why choose us for X?” “Is X right for me?” Click, expand, read three sentences, collapse, repeat.More recently, the justification for structuring pages in this way is almost always AI search. LLMs like question-and-answer content, so the assumption is that if you turn everything into questions, you’ll increase the chances of being cited. It’s become one of the most common recommendations in GEO and AEO audits, and as a result, plenty of content briefs now ask for it by default.To be clear, I’m not anti-FAQ. A good FAQ section answers real questions real customers ask. My problem is with the implementation that’s become standard: taking copy that should be static, structured body content and forcing it into question format, then hiding it behind accordions. Not everything needs to be a question. And when FAQs make up the bulk of the page, I’d argue they can end up holding a page back. Plus, I am getting sick to the back teeth of having to click on multiple accordions to read three sentences that could have just been visible to begin with. The FAQ-everything strategy happened for two reasons: an old SERP tactic and a new AI-visibility theory.The old one was FAQ rich results. From 2019, FAQPage schema could win you expandable dropdowns under your listing and a much bigger slice of the results page. Unsurprisingly, people abused it. Google cut eligibility back to well-known government and health sites in August 2023, and on 7 May 2026 it stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search altogether, with the Search Console report and Rich Results Test support following in June. FAQPage is still valid Schema.org markup; it just no longer buys you any SERP real estate.The new one is GEO. The logic makes sense: AI assistants answer questions, so content shaped like questions and answers is easier for them to lift and cite. There’s something in that, and I’ll come to it. But somewhere along the way “answer the questions your audience asks” became “format the entire page as questions”, and that’s a very different instruction.Add in the fact that FAQ blocks are fast to generate with AI, easy to slot into a CMS, and easy to tick off in an audit, and you get the current state of things, where the accordions now take up most of a page.To be fair to it, the FAQ format does some things well, but it’s worth being specific about what.Here’s the problem. Most of those pros apply to a well-written FAQ section. Very few of them survive when FAQs become the main body of the page.Google has told us directly that we don’t need to do thisGoogle’s own guide to optimising for generative AI search has a mythbusting section that lists “chunking” content and rewriting content just for AI systems as things you can ignore. It says its systems can understand multiple topics on a page and surface the relevant part, and that there’s no need to write in a particular way for AI. The same guide recommends organising content into paragraphs and sections with clear headings. That’s a description of a normal, well-structured page.You flatten your information architectureA good page has hierarchy: an H1, H2s for the main themes, H3s for the detail beneath them. That outline tells search engines and AI systems what the page is mainly about and how ideas relate. A wall of 20 FAQs dilutes what is really important. “What does it cost?” sits at the same level as “What is the service?” and “Do you work weekends?” Nothing signals what matters most.Sometimes there’s no heading structure at allSome accordion components render the question as a <button> or a styled  <div>, not a heading. Run the page through a heading checker, and you’ll sometimes find an H1 and nothing else. All that carefully chosen question phrasing is contributing nothing to the document outline.It drifts towards commodity content“What is X?”, “How does X work?” and “Why choose us?” are the most generic questions there are, and AI tools generate them in seconds. Google’s guidance explicitly favours non-commodity content with a unique point of view over common knowledge any site could publish. A page made mostly of stock questions is, by definition, saying what everyone else says.It creates duplication and cannibalisationOnce FAQ blocks become a template, the same or near-identical questions appear on every service page. Five pages all answering “How long does it take?” in slightly different words compete with each other and dilute what makes each page distinct.Answers are thin by designThe format pushes you towards two or three sentences per question. That’s great for an objection, poor for explaining a process, a comparison or a nuanced proposition. You lose depth, supporting evidence and natural places for internal links.It edges towards Google’s spam territoryGoogle warns that creating content for every possible variation of how people search, including fan-out queries, primarily to manipulate rankings or AI responses, breaches its scaled content abuse policy. A page padded with every conceivable question variant is heading in that direction.“Hidden content gets full weight” has caveatsIt holds only if the content is in the HTML on load. Some accordion builds fetch or inject the answer with JavaScript on click, which means it may never be indexed. And while Google says accordion content isn’t devalued, several practitioners have reported better results after making content visible by default. The general consensus is that it makes sense to show all the content at once when your audience needs most or all of it, and to avoid accordions when people are likely to read in a continuous flow. The list of accordion drawbacks reads like a description of the FAQ-led landing page:Persuasion suffers tooA landing page is meant to build a case: problem, solution, proof, action. Q&A format breaks that narrative into disconnected fragments, and the copy that should be doing the selling ends up behind a click.Accessibility issues caused by poor implementationPlain text is accessible by default, while accordions only become accessible if they’re built properly. That means a real button for the trigger, aria-expanded announcing the open or closed state, and collapsed content hidden from everyone, not just visually. Plenty of page-builder components get at least one of those wrong.It matters because headings are how most screen reader users get around. Long pages are easily navigated by headings, and introducing interactive elements that don’t behave as expected creates issues. An FAQ-led page with button-only questions takes away the main navigation method and replaces it with a major frustration.None of this is an argument against FAQ accordions. It’s an argument against hiding the core content of a page inside them.Take a fairly typical pet insurance product page. The content is often perfectly good: accurate, compliant and written by people who know the product. The page opens with a hero, a quote button and a couple of short paragraphs. Everything after that sits under an “FAQs” heading as a run of accordions, something like:Look at what’s behind the clicks. Aside from cost, the difference between cover types is the single most important decision a customer makes, and it can mean the difference between a long-term condition being covered for life or dropping out after 12 months. Here it’s one collapsed panel among eight, probably explained in a paragraph when it really needs a comparison table. What’s covered, what isn’t, and how the excess works are the substance of the product, and they’re hidden too.In a regulated product, that matters beyond SEO. The FCA’s Consumer Duty expects firms to support customers’ understanding of what they’re buying. Key exclusions like pre-existing conditions are exactly the kind of information you want customers to see, not information they have to go looking for.The content barely changes. The structure does: the cover options become visible and comparable, key exclusions sit where customers can’t miss them, the page’s outline actually describes the product, and the FAQ section is left doing what FAQs are good at.The alternative isn’t new. It’s how we built pages before every brief started asking for an FAQ: visible body copy, organised under a logical heading hierarchy, with each section opening on a clear, direct statement.Almost everything that makes a Q&A pair easy to extract can be done in static copy. A descriptive H2 or H3 followed by a direct first sentence that answers it is just as liftable as a question-and-answer pair. Sometimes the heading can even be a question, where that’s genuinely how people think about it. The difference is that it’s one tool in the structure, not the whole structure.So when should you use an FAQ? My rule of thumb: if the content is part of the core case for the page, it belongs in the body copy. If it’s a genuine, specific question that only some visitors will have, it can go in the FAQ.FAQs aren’t the problem, but using them as a substitute for structuring a page properly is.The reasons for adding excessive FAQs to landing pages have mostly evaporated. The rich result has gone, and Google says you don’t need to chunk or rewrite content for AI. And the things that genuinely help AI and search engines understand a page – clear hierarchy, direct answers, depth and distinctiveness – are exactly what good static copy delivers anyway.Meanwhile, the costs are real: flatter architecture, thinner and more generic content, duplication across templates, more friction for visitors, and a worse experience for anyone navigating by screen reader.So write the page first. Structure it with proper headings. Answer the big questions in the body copy, where people and machines can both see them. Then, if there are genuine questions left over, add a short FAQ at the end. That’s not me being anti-GEO. It’s just good SEO, which, as Google keeps reminding us, is pretty much the same thing.Enjoy this post?Sign up to Browser Media Bytes for similar posts straight to your inbox.If you want to talk digital marketing, we would love to hear from you. Please feel free to send us a message via the form.+44 (0)20 7099 0945Browser Media Studios, Office A, Stable 7, Stable Road, Colchester, CO2 7GL, UK.© Copyright 2026 Browser Media. All rights reserved.Company No. : 05572419   |  VAT No. : GB 867367377Privacy Policy | Cookie Policy | Terms of Use | Consent Preferencessource