Does HowTo Schema Still Do Anything in 2026?

HowTo markup earns you nothing in Google Search, and it has earned nothing since 13 September 2023. The rich result is deprecated, the documentation page is deleted, and the URL where it used to live now redirects to the changelog entry announcing its own removal.

That is the flat answer. It is also incomplete, because HowTo and its child types have not disappeared from Google's live documentation. They survive in two places, in current docs, attached to features that still work. Which of those applies to you decides whether you spend an afternoon deleting markup or ten seconds leaving it alone.

The short answer

• HowTo rich results ended on 13 September 2023. Google called the result type deprecated in its own update.
• The documentation was removed the same month. The old URL now redirects to /search/updates#how-to-deprecation.
• schema.org/HowTo is still a live type with no deprecation notice.
• HowToStep and HowToSection are used throughout Google's current Recipe documentation, and Recipe still earns a rich result.
• HowTo is still listed as a valid itemReviewed type in the current review snippet documentation.

The removal, in Google's words

A Search Central post dated 8 August 2023 announced two changes at once. FAQ rich results were narrowed to well-known government and health sites. HowTo rich results were limited to desktop, with this note: "How-To (from HowTo structured data) rich results will only be shown for desktop users, and not for users on mobile devices."

Five weeks later the same post got an update, dated 14 September 2023:

Continuing our efforts to simplify Google's search results, we're extending the How-to change to desktop as well. As of September 13, Google Search no longer shows How-to rich results on desktop, which means this result type is now deprecated.

The post goes on to say Google would drop the How-to search appearance, the rich result report and Rich Results Test support within 30 days. Search Console API support lasted 180. The documentation changelog for September 2023 records the rest: "Removed the How-to structured data documentation, as this rich result is no longer shown in search results, on both desktop and mobile devices."

You can confirm the end state without taking anyone's word for it. Request developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/how-to. When we checked on 15 August 2026 it redirected to /search/updates#how-to-deprecation, the changelog anchor for its own deletion. The same thing later happened to FAQ, which we covered in FAQ schema is deprecated, what to do with the markup.

Note what Google did not say. It never said the markup was invalid, never asked anyone to remove it, and never described it as a penalty risk. The advice it gave in the same post about the sibling change applies here too: "While you can drop this structured data from your site, there's no need to proactively remove it."

Where HowTo still lives in Google's current docs

Two places, and both take about a minute to check yourself.

Inside Recipe. Google's Recipe structured data documentation is live, maintained, and Recipe is one of the 25 features still listed in the rich results gallery. Its recipeInstructions examples are built out of HowToStep objects, and its multi-section examples use HowToSection. We counted the current page on 15 August 2026: HowToStep appears 33 times and HowToSection 18 times.

Google's own example, from that documentation:

"recipeInstructions": [
  {
    "@type": "HowToStep",
    "name": "Blend",
    "text": "Blend 400ml of pineapple juice and 100ml cream of coconut until smooth.",
    "url": "https://example.com/non-alcoholic-pina-colada#step1",
    "image": "https://example.com/photos/non-alcoholic-pina-colada/step1.jpg"
  },
  {
    "@type": "HowToStep",
    "name": "Fill",
    "text": "Fill a glass with ice.",
    "url": "https://example.com/non-alcoholic-pina-colada#step2"
  }
]

That is a deprecated feature's building block sitting inside a supported feature's required shape. Google retired the container, not the parts.

Inside review snippets. The review snippet documentation lists the valid types for AggregateRating.itemReviewed. HowTo is on that list, alongside Book, Course, Event, Game, LocalBusiness, Movie, Organization, Product, Recipe and SoftwareApplication. Google's live docs still contemplate a rated HowTo object, three years after the rich result died.

Neither of these means HowTo markup on your tutorial page does anything. Both mean the type was retired as a search feature rather than removed from Google's model of the world, which is a distinction worth carrying into the next deprecation.

What schema.org still says

schema.org/HowTo defines the type as "Instructions that explain how to achieve a result by performing a sequence of steps." It carries step, tool, supply, totalTime, prepTime, performTime and estimatedCost, with no deprecation flag anywhere on the page.

This is the same situation as FAQPage. schema.org is a vocabulary maintained by a community; Google is one consumer of it and can drop a feature without touching the definition. A validator that reports HowTo as an error is wrong. A validator that reports it as earning no Google rich result is right. Ours does the second, and our HowTo schema generator says so on the page rather than selling you output it knows is decorative.

A minimal valid HowTo, if you have a non-Google reason to emit one:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "HowTo",
  "name": "Rotate an API key without downtime",
  "totalTime": "PT15M",
  "step": [
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "name": "Issue the new key",
      "text": "Create a second key in the provider dashboard and leave the old one active."
    },
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "name": "Deploy both",
      "text": "Ship the new key to production while the old key is still accepted."
    },
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "name": "Revoke the old key",
      "text": "Confirm zero traffic on the old key in provider logs, then revoke it."
    }
  ]
}

name and step carry the meaning. Everything else is optional detail, and totalTime uses ISO 8601 duration format, which is why fifteen minutes is PT15M and ninety is PT1H30M.

Does it help AI answers?

No published evidence says it does, and Google says the opposite about its own AI features.

Its guide to optimizing for generative AI features names overfocusing on structured data as a mistake: "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add." The same guide tells you to skip chunking your content and skip creating AI text files like llms.txt, which we went through in llms.txt vs robots.txt vs sitemap.xml.

For other answer engines, no operator has documented that it reads HowTo markup, and we have not measured it. We are not going to imply a result we do not have. What is known about how sources get selected is in what gets cited in AI answers, and none of it turns on schema type.

An answer engine can extract your steps from an ordered list in the HTML. That is already what it does with the many tutorials carrying no markup at all. The markup was never the mechanism.

What actually replaces it

Nothing replaces it, because the rich result was the whole benefit and the rich result is gone. What is left is the ordinary work of making steps legible.

Every row moves information from a place only parsers look into a place both parsers and humans look. That trade was always available and the rich result was the only reason not to take it. The schema types that still earn something in 2026 covers what to spend the recovered effort on.

Keep or remove

Keep it, unless it is generated from content the user cannot see. Google's introduction to structured data says not to "add structured data about information that is not visible to the user, even if the information is accurate". That was true before the deprecation and still is.

Otherwise the calculation is simple. Removing HowTo markup costs a template change, a deploy and a regression risk, and returns nothing measurable. Leaving it costs a few hundred bytes per page. Google has said plainly that unused structured data causes no problems for Search. Spend the sprint on something that pays.

What to do next

If you maintain recipes, check that your recipeInstructions use HowToStep rather than plain strings, because that part is still live and still eligible. Run the page through our schema validator to see what a parser gets back.

If you maintain tutorials, do nothing to the markup and go look at the steps themselves. Are they in the HTML as an ordered list, before any JavaScript runs? That question decides more than any schema type does, and should you block AI crawlers covers the other half of whether anything can read your page at all.

Then check whether it made a difference where it counts. Our product, SEOBuilder, scans live AI answers for the questions you care about and returns the citation URLs. You can see whether your tutorial is named, or whether someone else's is. Seven engines, to be exact, Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT among them.

The method is in how to measure AI visibility. If you are weighing whether to run this yourself, build versus buy has the arithmetic.