The short versiontap to open or close
- Your customers already wrote your best content. It’s the handful of questions they ask you every single week.
- Search and AI chat run on questions now. A plain answer on your own page is one of the easiest things for Google and tools like ChatGPT to find and repeat.
- Writing FAQs is a checkup for your business. You can’t answer “How much does it cost?” in two sentences until you’ve decided what it costs.
- People actually read them. On the local service sites we track, the FAQ page was the 5th to 11th most viewed page from March to October 2026, and it was in the top 15 every time we checked.
- Start with your phone. Ask whoever answers it for the ten questions they hear most, and answer those first.
Almost every business we’ve worked with over the last sixteen years has the same thing hiding in plain sight: a short list of questions customers ask over and over. How much does it cost? How long does it take? Do you come out to my area? What happens if something goes wrong?
Whoever answers your phone could recite them in their sleep. A lot of websites never answer them at all.
That’s one of the easiest wins left in search, and it’s getting bigger now that people ask AI chat tools instead of typing keywords.
People search in questions now
People don’t just type “dentist insurance” anymore. They ask, “Does this dentist take my insurance?” They ask Google out loud in the car. They ask ChatGPT while they’re standing in line.
When that question goes into Google, an AI answer often shows up above the links. When it goes into ChatGPT or Gemini, the AI writes the answer itself. Either way, the answer leans on web pages that already answer the question, and those are the pages that get cited.
So here’s the real question for your business: when someone asks what your customers ask, is your website one of the pages with the answer?
A good FAQ is shaped the way those tools like it. The question is written the way a customer would say it. The answer comes first, in a sentence or two. Easy for a person to scan, easy for a machine to repeat.
A quick technical note. We still add question-and-answer markup (structured data) to every FAQ we build, because Google still recommends structured data as part of good SEO. But Google stopped showing the old FAQ drop-downs in its results on May 7, 2026, and it says no special markup is required for its AI answers. The markup is a label. The words do the work. (Structured data is one of the five things that get you found on ChatGPT and Gemini.)
Writing them makes you look hard at your business
This is the part nobody talks about, and it may be the most valuable.
You can’t answer “How much does it cost?” in two sentences until you’ve decided what it costs. You can’t answer “How far will you travel?” until you’ve drawn the line on a map. You can’t answer “What if I’m not happy?” until you know what you’ll actually do about it.
When we sit down with an owner to write FAQs, that’s when you find out the answer depends on who picks up the phone. Or the website says one thing and the owner says another. Or a question everybody asks has no good answer yet, which means it was never a marketing problem. It was a business decision nobody had made.
Writing FAQs is looking at your business through your customer’s eyes. It’s a checkup worth doing even if nobody ever read the page.
But people do read it.
People read FAQ pages, and we checked
I’ve believed for years that the FAQ page is one of the most visited pages on a small business website. Before I wrote that down, we checked it against real numbers.
We pulled seven months of page view data, March to October 2026, from the client websites we track and ranked every page on each site by views. On the local service sites with a real FAQ page, from a dental practice to a self-storage facility to a home builder to house cleaning companies:
- The FAQ page was the 5th to 11th most viewed page on the site.
- It stayed in the top 15 every single time we checked, March through October.
- On the dental practice’s site, it pulled more views than the About page and every doctor’s bio.
- On the self-storage site, only the home page, the rates page, the contact page and the size guide got more views.
In my experience, the people opening an FAQ page aren’t browsing. They’re checking the last few things before they call, book or buy.
To be fair, it isn’t automatic. On a few sites we track, the FAQ page barely gets opened. The page isn’t magic. The answers are, and they work best where people already are.
Put the answers where the questions happen
That’s why we don’t stop at one FAQ page. We also put short question-and-answer sections on the service pages, next to the thing each answer is about.
Here’s a real one. One of our clients moves copiers for businesses all over the country. In September, they ranked first on Google for “copier lease return”, but the AI answer sitting above the results didn’t mention them.
So we wrote question-and-answer sections for their service pages, about 30 questions in plain customer language. The company’s president read every answer and changed what needed changing, because the answers are theirs. They went live in early October, marked up on every page.
While those answers were still in review, the president sent us a screenshot: Google’s AI answer was naming the company, with the name slightly wrong. The AI was already reading about them, and it was filling in details on its own. Clear answers in the company’s own words, on its own pages, give it less to fill in.
It’s too early for a before and after on that one. But that’s exactly the job FAQs do.
How to write yours this week
- Ask whoever answers your phone for the ten questions they hear most. Write them down exactly the way customers say them.
- Answer first, explain second. Lead with yes, no, the price range or the time frame. Then a sentence or two of detail.
- Answer the awkward ones. Price, what’s not included, what happens when something goes wrong. People are nervous to ask those out loud, so they type them instead.
- Put each answer where it belongs. The top few on the matching service page, all of them on one FAQ page linked from your menu or footer.
- Keep them current. When prices, hours or your service area change, the answers change the same day. A wrong answer repeated by an AI is worse than none.
If you want a second set of eyes first, our free site audit checks how ready your website is for AI answers, structured data included, and emails you the results in about 30 seconds.
And if you’d rather we write them with you, that’s what we do. We’ll find the real questions your customers ask, write answers in your voice for your approval, and build them into your site the right way. Let’s talk.
The bottom line
Your customers have already told you what belongs on your website. They ask it every week. Answer plainly, put the answers where people look, and you’ll show up better in Google, give AI tools something accurate to repeat, and learn a few things about your own business along the way.
That’s the easiest win in search I know.
How we checked: page views come from Google Analytics for the client websites we track, March to October 2026, ranked by total views per site and checked in every snapshot we hold. Google’s changes come from Google Search Central: the FAQ rich result stopped appearing on May 7, 2026, and its guide to AI features says no special markup is required.