When I started working professionally on a web development team, there were several trends that showed up on far too many websites, and my team was pretty determined to rid the world of them: swoosh logos, unwarranted animations, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).

I’ll leave the first two alone for now. (Someday pull me aside and ask me about the dancing potato on one of our client sites before we worked on it.) Instead, I want to pick on the FAQ.

The Trouble With Traditional FAQ Pages

Back in the late 1990s, FAQ was often a misnomer. The idea itself was sound. Reduce reliance on customer service by clearly answering the most commonly asked questions in one place. Helpful for users, efficient for organizations. All good intentions.

The problem, in our eyes, was that it ignored a basic truth. The whole website was supposed to answer people’s questions. If users had to retreat to a separate FAQ page to find what they needed, that usually signaled a deeper user experience problem. The site was not intuitive, not discoverable, and often inwardly focused instead of built around real user needs.

Worse, many FAQs did not reflect what people were actually asking. They reflected what the organization wanted people to ask. Carefully constructed questions designed to tee up smart-sounding answers.

So for the better part of 25 years, I have gone around removing FAQ pages and blocks wherever I was allowed. My teams hunted FAQs in the wild nearly to extinction.

Nearly.

Then came AI and conversational search.

How AI Reshaped the FAQ Conversation

When someone types a question into Google or asks ChatGPT something directly, those systems look for clear, explicit answers in the content they can access. When they find a question that is asked and answered cleanly, they tend to use it. If they do not, they synthesize an answer from partial information.

That synthesis is where things get risky. AI does not often say, “I don’t know.” It produces what it calculates an answer should look like, sometimes making assumptions or getting details wrong.

At the same time, more people are turning to AI to ask real questions, not just trivial ones. Questions about programs, policies, costs, requirements, or expectations. And if your website is the authoritative source for those answers, you want to be very sure that the answers being returned are accurate, and that they are coming from you.

This is why FAQs are useful now. And why I have had to adjust my attitude toward them.

Used correctly, FAQ blocks are foundational to having your content interpreted accurately by AI systems.

To be clear, this does not mean resurrecting the old model of dumping a long list of questions onto a standalone FAQ page. It still does not make sense to invent questions no one is actually asking just to sound clever.

Instead, the work is to understand what real users want to know, and to answer those questions clearly and reliably in context. FAQ blocks that are properly marked up using schema help machines recognize those answers with confidence.

Clarity for Readers, Precision for AI

Adding FAQs to your site does mean that you should replace your existing content. Humans still want explanations, stories, and nuance. Think of FAQ blocks as reinforcement, not substitution. They are a bridge between human-friendly content and machine-readable clarity.

And in this era, adding well-crafted FAQ blocks is relatively easy to do.

So yes, I’ve made peace with FAQs.

But if swoosh logos or dancing potatoes make a comeback, that will be a whole different conversation.