HowTo Schema Is Gone: What to Do With Your How-To Markup Now

In September 2023, Google removed HowTo rich results from desktop and dropped them entirely shortly after, ending a feature that once gave step-by-step content expandable carousels and step thumbnails in search. If you still have HowTo JSON-LD on your pages, it now does nothing for Google, and the only open questions are whether to remove it and how to protect the rankings the underlying content already earns.

What actually happened

Google retired the HowTo rich result, not the schema vocabulary. The distinction matters. The HowTo type still exists in the Schema.org vocabulary and is technically valid markup, but Google no longer renders any special search appearance from it. The same wave of changes downgraded FAQ rich results to a tiny set of authoritative health and government sites, so HowTo was part of a broader pullback from interactive, content-derived SERP features.

The practical consequences:

• No visual treatment. No step carousels, no expandable steps, no step images in Google results.
• No Search Console reporting. The HowTo enhancement report was removed, so you no longer get validity or error data for it.
• No penalty for keeping it. Google does not flag leftover HowTo markup as an error. It is simply ignored.
• The Rich Results Test no longer recognizes it. Testing a page with HowTo markup returns no detected rich result, which is expected, not a bug in your implementation.

Should you remove the markup?

There is no SEO benefit to keeping HowTo markup and no ranking penalty for leaving it. The decision is really about code hygiene and risk, not rankings. Here is how I advise clients to triage it.

Remove it when

• The markup is hand-maintained and adds friction every time someone edits the page. Stale step markup that no longer matches the visible content is a maintenance liability.
• You are consolidating or auditing structured data and want the page's JSON-LD to reflect only what Google actively uses. A clean graph is easier to reason about.
• The HowTo block references images or steps that no longer exist, which can confuse other parsers and your own future audits.

Leave it when

• It is auto-generated by your CMS or a plugin and removing it would mean touching templates across hundreds of URLs for zero ranking gain. Spend that engineering time elsewhere.
• You care about non-Google consumers. Valid HowTo data is still machine-readable, and some assistants, aggregators, and emerging LLM-based answer systems may parse it. It is not wasted in a broader entity sense, just inert for Google's SERP.

My default recommendation: do not launch a dedicated removal project. Strip HowTo markup opportunistically when you are already editing a page or template, and prioritize migrating it only where it is co-mingled with markup Google does use.

Protect the content's search value first

This is the part that actually moves traffic. The rich result is gone, but how-to content still ranks on the strength of its words, structure, and helpfulness. Losing the markup changes nothing about why these pages earn clicks. Reinforce that foundation.

1. Keep steps as real on-page HTML. Use a genuine <ol> with one step per <li>, or clear <h2>/<h3> step headings. Google's text and AI Overview extraction reads the visible DOM, not your JSON-LD. Markup was never required for a how-to to rank, and it still isn't.
2. Number and name each step explicitly. "Step 1: Disconnect the power" outperforms a vague paragraph for featured-snippet and AI Overview eligibility, which is now the realistic upside for procedural content.
3. Keep step images, but as standard <img> tags with descriptive alt text. You lose the carousel thumbnail, not Google Images traffic.
4. Front-load a tools/materials and time summary near the top. This is the content that step-rich results used to surface; putting it in visible text preserves the user value and snippet potential.
5. Strengthen internal linking to the how-to from related pages so it is not solely dependent on a SERP feature that no longer exists.

What to migrate the markup effort toward

If you have engineering time earmarked for structured data, redirect it to types Google still rewards with rich results or uses for entity understanding:

• Article / TechArticle for the page itself, which keeps your authorship, publish date, and publisher signals intact.
• VideoObject if your how-to includes a video. Video rich results and key-moment Clip markup are alive and valuable, and many how-to pages already have a companion video that is under-marked.
• Product and Review where the tutorial involves a specific product, since those rich results remain fully supported.
• Breadcrumb markup for cleaner SERP paths, which is still rendered.

In other words, the labor that once went into maintaining step-by-step markup is better spent describing the page and its media in ways Google actively consumes.

Common mistakes

• Treating the deprecation as a ranking event. Pages did not lose rankings because HowTo went away; they lost a visual SERP enhancement. If a how-to page dropped in traffic around that time, investigate content quality, intent shifts, and AI Overviews, not the missing markup.
• Panic-deleting structured data sitewide. Yanking JSON-LD blocks in bulk risks collateral damage to Article, Breadcrumb, or Organization markup nested in the same script. Remove surgically.
• Stripping the visible steps along with the markup. Some teams delete the ordered list because they conflate the on-page content with the schema. The content is the asset. Never remove it.
• Replacing HowTo with FAQ markup to "recover" the feature. FAQ rich results are also restricted now, so this swap rebuilds nothing and can clutter the page with awkward Q&A phrasing.
• Leaving broken image references in dead HowTo blocks. If you keep the markup, at least make sure it still validates against Schema.org so it remains useful to other parsers.

FAQ

Will leftover HowTo markup hurt my rankings? No. Google ignores it. There is no manual action or quality signal tied to keeping valid but unused structured data.

Do other search engines or AI tools still use it? Possibly. The vocabulary is valid and machine-readable, so non-Google consumers and some answer engines may parse it. That is a modest reason to leave auto-generated markup in place, not a reason to invest in maintaining it.

Is there any rich result left for how-to content? Not a dedicated one. Your realistic SERP upside is featured snippets and AI Overviews, both of which are won through clear, well-structured visible content, plus video rich results if you add a tutorial video.

Should I update my sitemap or request reindexing after removing it? No special action is needed. Let Google recrawl naturally; removing inert markup is not a change that requires forcing reprocessing.