The first time we measured a citation lift from FAQ schema, my reaction was something like "great, write it up." That instinct is exactly how teams ship findings that don't hold. We waited, then we tried to break the finding. Part of it broke. Part of it didn't.

This is the report.

The initial finding

In a 12-client portfolio, across roughly 180 pages where we added FAQ schema to existing pages that already had FAQ-style content in the visible HTML, we measured a 14% relative lift in A+B tier citations over an 8-week window after deployment. The control was an internal A/B-style split where roughly half of comparable pages on the same domains got the schema and half didn't, with the assignment based on publication date (older half got it, newer didn't) to avoid biasing toward fresher content.

14% looked clean.…