aeo/faq-coverage flags any page that reads like an FAQ (at least 2 question-phrased H2 headings starting with how, what, or why, or a /faq, /how-to-, or /what-is- URL path) whose question-and-answer pairs are not laid out where an answer engine can lift them whole, and it asks you to fix that in the visible page rather than by bolting on FAQPage JSON-LD, a rich result Google switched off on May 7, 2026.
Optimize your content to trigger Google AI Overviews and answer engine summaries:
aeo/faq-coverage looks at each page and asks two questions in sequence. First, does this page look like FAQ or how-to content? It looks that way if 2 or more of its H2 headings are phrased as questions, a heading that ends in a question mark, or one that opens with a question word like how, what, why, when, where, who, can, does, is, are, should, or which, or if the URL path matches a question pattern such as /faq, /how-to-, /what-is-, /guide-, or /questions. The trigger threshold is the faqMinQuestionHeadings option, which defaults to 2.
Second, are those pairs already declared machine-readably? The rule walks the page's JSON-LD graph and goes quiet the moment it finds an @type of FAQPage, HowTo, or QAPage anywhere in the tree, because a page carrying that markup has nothing left for a crawl to point out. That is a pass condition, not a recommendation: the finding it writes never asks you to add any of those three types.
The finding lands at info severity with medium confidence. Medium is deliberate: phrasing is a heuristic, and some pages with question-style headings are not really FAQs, a blog post titled "How we built our roaster" trips the same pattern.
An answer engine quoting your page has to decide where one answer starts and stops. When a question sits in its own heading and the complete answer occupies the paragraph directly beneath it, that decision is trivial and the quote comes out intact. When the same material is spread across a wall of prose, three bullets, and a sentence that begins "as mentioned above", the engine either reassembles it badly or skips you for a competitor whose layout was easier to read.
For years the reflex answer to this was markup. Through 2022, FAQPage JSON-LD commonly earned the expandable accordion in blue-link results. Google narrowed that feature to authoritative government and health sites in August 2023, announced on May 8, 2026 that it would stop appearing entirely from May 7, 2026, and deleted the FAQPage documentation on June 15, 2026. HowTo went the same way in September 2023.
So the markup is not the fix any more, and this rule does not ask for it. QAPage is not a substitute either: Google documents it for pages where users can submit answers, not for a site's own FAQ.
/guides/how-to-dial-in-espresso on a home-barista blog. The page is a genuine walkthrough with five question-phrased H2s, "How fine should I grind for espresso?", "Why is my shot pulling in 9 seconds?", "What does channeling in the portafilter look like?", "How tight should I tamp?", and "When should I adjust grind size versus dose?". The URL path matches /how-to- and the page carries 5 question H2s, well past the threshold of 2. But every answer opens with two paragraphs of throat-clearing about the author's cafe before the number arrives, and the grind-size answer finishes three headings later under "A note on burrs". The rule fires at info: the questions are there, liftable answers are not.
The same espresso guide after the author moves each answer up under its own question. "How fine should I grind for espresso?" is now followed immediately by "Grind finer until your double shot extracts in 25 to 30 seconds with a steady tiger-stripe crema", and the 9-second heading by "A 9 second gusher means the grind is too coarse or the dose too low, so the puck offers no resistance". Nothing was deleted; the cafe anecdotes moved below the answers they used to bury. Asked "why is my espresso shot too fast", an assistant can now quote one paragraph verbatim and attribute it. The rule stays silent, and no JSON-LD was added to earn that.
aeo/faq-coverage is an answer-engine-optimization rule, not a spam classifier; it fires at info severity and never blocks a verdict, because a page whose answers are hard to lift is a missed opportunity, not a manipulation. The page has already done the hard part by writing real answers; the rule is asking it to lay them out where a machine can find them.
The one place it brushes against spam thinking is templated Q&A. Question-and-answer blocks are trivial to generate at scale, and a generator that stamps the same three questions onto ten thousand pages with only the city or product name swapped produces the exact mass-production fingerprint that Google's scaled-content-abuse policy was written to demote. Page-specific answers are the only kind worth rendering; boilerplate just makes the sameness easier to detect.
This rule ships in @pseolint/core, MIT-licensed at github.com/ouranos-labs/pseolint.
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