52% of UK SME Websites Have FAQ Content But No FAQ Schema: The Markup Gap Our Research Uncovered

Last updated: March 2026

We checked 30 UK small business websites to see how they handle FAQ content. More than half had question-and-answer content on their homepage — but no structured markup to help AI systems or search engines identify it as such.

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TL;DR

• 16 out of 25 accessible UK SME websites had FAQ-style content on their homepage (64%)
• Only 3 of those had FAQ schema markup (12%)
• 13 out of 25 had FAQ content without FAQ schema — a 52% gap
• The content has been written. The signal that tells machines "this is a question and answer" has not been added
• This was consistent across industries, from accountancy to plumbing

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What is the FAQ schema gap?

Many UK business websites include question-and-answer content on their pages. Headings like "How much does it cost?", "What services do you offer?" or "How does the process work?" are common across service business websites. This content is useful for visitors and is often written with the intention of helping potential customers understand what a business does.

FAQ schema — formally known as FAQPage structured data — is a layer of markup that sits behind this content and tells search engines and AI systems: "This section contains questions and answers." It is defined by Schema.org and is recognised by Google, Bing, and the AI platforms that crawl the web.

Without this markup, the question-and-answer content still exists on the page. A human visitor can read it perfectly well. But for machines parsing thousands of pages to build answers, the content is not labelled. It sits within the general page text without any structured signal distinguishing it from any other paragraph.

The gap we found is between the effort businesses have already put in — writing FAQ content — and the relatively small additional step of marking it up so machines can identify it.

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What we f