Yes, answer them on the page. Only 8 of 39 top-ranked Grand Rapids trade sites mark their FAQs up.

The question gets asked in two forms. A plumber asks whether their site needs an FAQ page. A roofer asks whether the FAQ section their designer wants to add is worth the money. Both are really asking the same thing: is this a real part of a website, or is it filler?

Search for it and you get vendor blog posts — agencies and website platforms explaining why you need the thing they sell. So we measured instead. Not opinions about FAQs: what the sites already beating you in Grand Rapids actually ship.

Where the number comes from, and what it does not say

On 15 September 2026 we ran a sweep of the businesses appearing in four Google Maps result sets for Grand Rapids — plumbers, roofers, HVAC and electricians, ten each. For each of the 40 we found the company's own domain and fetched exactly one thing: the homepage HTML, once, no retries. Thirty-nine answered; one electrician's site timed out at twenty seconds and is excluded from every count below.

Then every <script type="application/ld+json"> block on those homepages was parsed and its @type values collected, including types nested inside @graph. The count reported here is the number of sites whose served HTML carried a FAQPage node.

Three limits, stated plainly, because they change what you are allowed to conclude:

• The sweep measured the schema, not the page. There is no field in the data for "has a visible list of questions and answers". So we can tell you how many sites marked an FAQ up for machines; we cannot tell you how many show one to a human, and this article does not claim a count of visible FAQ sections.
• Homepage only. A site with a beautifully written FAQ on an interior page — or on a dedicated /faq/ — counts as a no here, because we never fetched that page.
• Served HTML only. The fetch was a plain request with no browser. Anything a site assembles with JavaScript after load is invisible to this measurement.

Read the number as a floor, in other words. At least 8 of 39 do this in a way a machine can read on the first page it sees. The true number of sites with some FAQ somewhere is higher — and unmeasured.

The split by trade

Eight of thirty-nine is the headline. The split underneath it is more interesting than the total.

Trade	Sites measured	Carried FAQPage markup	Verdict
Plumbers	10	3	All three were city pages on a multi-location brand's domain, not single-location local sites
Roofers	10	3	All three independent local sites — the one trade where local operators do this
HVAC	10	0	Nobody. And every one of the ten shipped other structured data
Electricians	9	2	One large multi-trade site, one small single-page-style site
All four	39	8	Roughly one site in five, on the page we fetched

Two things fall out of the raw data that the headline hides.

It is not a capability problem. Of the 39 sites, 32 served some structured data. Twenty-four of them shipped structured data and no FAQPage — a business type, an offer catalogue, breadcrumbs, a WebSite node, all correctly implemented, and no questions. Seven sites served no JSON-LD at all. So for the large majority of the field, marking up an FAQ was not beyond the tooling. It simply was not done.

Where it was done, it was done properly. All eight FAQPage sites also carried at least one Question node. Nobody shipped an empty FAQPage shell — which happens more often than you would think when a plugin is switched on and never filled in.

Zero of ten HVAC sites. All ten of them ship other structured data. That is not a technical ceiling, it is an unclaimed square of the board.

And the plumber row is the one to sit with. Three plumber sites carried it, and all three were Grand Rapids location pages on national brands' domains — corporate templates, where somebody at head office made the decision once for hundreds of city pages. Not one independently-owned plumber in that top ten had it. If you own a plumbing company here, the sites doing this are not your local competitors outworking you; they are franchise software.

Google retired the FAQ rich result in 2026. Answer the questions anyway.

Here is where most advice on this topic is years stale, so let us be exact about what Google's own documentation says today.

Go to Google's FAQ structured data documentation now and you do not land on documentation. The URL redirects to Google's Search Central changelog, at the entry titled "Removing documentation for the FAQ rich result feature" (developers.google.com/search/updates, read 16 September 2026). The reason Google gives, in the June 2026 entry: "The FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results".

The month before, the May 2026 entry added a deprecation notice, with the reason: "This feature will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026" (same changelog, read 16 September 2026).

And even before that, the rich result had not been available to a contractor for two years. A September 2023 change to the same documentation restricted it to, in Google's words, sites that are "only shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites" (same changelog, read 16 September 2026).

So the honest position for a trade business in 2026 is this. FAQ markup will not get you a bigger listing on Google. It has not been able to since 2023, and since 7 May 2026 the feature does not exist for anyone. If a proposal on your desk lists "FAQ schema for rich snippets" as a deliverable with a price attached, the person who wrote it has not read Google's documentation this year.

That is an argument against one sales pitch. It is not an argument against answering the questions, for three reasons:

• The answers are still read. The markup is valid schema.org, and it is a clean, unambiguous statement of "this block of text answers this question" for any parser — including the answer engines people now ask instead of searching. Losing a Google display format did not make structured text unreadable.
• The visible answer was always the point. A homeowner deciding between you and the next listing wants to know if you come out on a Sunday and whether you drive to Rockford. Answering that on the page converts whether or not a single crawler notices.
• It is the cheapest content you will ever write. You already know the answers. You give them out loud, several times a day, for free.

If you want the wider picture of what structured data is still worth on a small business site after this change, we measured that from the same sweep in does a small business website need schema markup.

The five questions a plumber's page should answer

Forget the format for a moment. If you run a plumbing company, these are the five things a stranger needs to know before they will call you, and they are the five things your phone asks you all day. Written as questions, because that is how they arrive:

1. "What does a service call cost, and what does that price include?" — a range, and whether the visit charge comes off the repair. Use your real numbers; there are none in this article for exactly that reason. If publishing a range makes you uneasy, that is a genuine debate and we took a side in should a contractor put prices on their website.
2. "Do you answer the phone at 2am, and does an after-hours call cost more?" — "24/7 emergency service" in a banner is not an answer. Whether a human picks up at 2am on a Sunday, and what changes about the bill, is.
3. "Which towns do you actually drive to?" — name them. Not "West Michigan". The towns. A reader in Byron Center is deciding whether you are worth a phone call, and a list they can find themselves in settles it in four seconds.
4. "Are you licensed and insured in Michigan, and can I see it?" — a plain yes with the licence detail on the page. This is the single question people are most embarrassed to ask out loud and most want answered before they let someone into the house.
5. "How do I book — call, text, or a form? And when will someone get back to me?" — with a real response window, and with the method the reader prefers actually available. Worth knowing: not one of the 39 sites in the sweep offered a text link. We wrote that one up separately in click-to-call and text links on contractor websites.

Those five work for any trade with the nouns swapped. A roofer answers what an inspection costs, whether they tarp same-day in a storm, which townships, licence and insurance, and how to book. An HVAC company answers the same five about a no-heat call in January.

A section on the service page beats a separate FAQ page

The original question — "should we have an FAQ page?" — quietly assumes the answers belong in one place. That is usually the weakest option available.

A dedicated FAQ page gathers every answer into a room the reader has to decide to walk into, usually through a footer link, usually after the moment they wanted the answer has passed. Somebody reading your emergency page at midnight is not going to go hunting for your FAQ page to learn whether you charge extra after hours.

Put each answer where its question occurs:

• After-hours pricing → on the emergency service page, next to the phone number.
• Service area → wherever you ask for the job, on every service page.
• Licence and insurance → beside the booking form, where the hesitation happens.
• Price basis → on the page for the service being priced.
• How to book and the callback window → next to every call to action.

A short "Common questions" block at the foot of a service page — three to five entries, marked up as FAQPage — is a perfectly good way to do this, and it is what this article does at the bottom. A separate FAQ page is fine as a second home for the same answers. It is a bad first home.

One more thing the sweep is worth quoting for: the homepages we fetched had a median of five internal links to service pages, and a maximum of seventy-one. The sites with the deepest service-page structure are not competing on one clever page — they answer questions in many places. The full checklist from that sweep is in what top-ranked Grand Rapids trade websites have in common.

What to ask for when you buy the site

If you are commissioning or renewing a trade website, this is a line item worth naming out loud, because it is small, it is cheap, and it is skipped by default.

And if someone quotes you for FAQ schema on the grounds that it will win you a rich result in Google, show them the changelog entry above. The markup is still worth having for the parsers that read it. The rich result is not coming back.

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Common questions