Practices we refuse to bill for

No. Google's changelog says the feature “will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026” — and for most sites the rich results had already been restricted to government and health sites back in 2023.

The honest nuance: visible FAQ content still helps. People read the answers, and AI engines quote them. What died is the paid “FAQ schema” line item — markup for a display feature that no longer exists.

Google removed them in 2023 — “no longer shown in search results, on both desktop and mobile devices” (changelog note dated September 14, 2023). Any current invoice for How-to markup is billing for a feature retired years ago.

Because Google rules them out. Reviews controlled by the entity they describe are “self-serving” and ineligible for star review features. Stars you publish about yourself on your own site get you nothing. Your stars belong where they count: your Google Business Profile and third-party review sites.

No — and this one comes straight from Google: “You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.”

What Google says does matter: crawlable pages and genuinely useful, extractable content. That's structure work and writing work — not a markup product.

Regulation Z is specific. Under 12 CFR 1026.24(d), stating any of four triggering terms in an ad — a downpayment amount or percentage, the number of payments or period of repayment, a payment amount, or a finance-charge amount — requires additional disclosures, including the APR. We check every financing figure against that list before it runs, and we log the check.

Here is our precise wording, because precision is the point: we searched for an independent award program for US residential-trade or independent auto-repair websites and found none — only agency self-published “best websites” listicles, and general web awards honoring roofing manufacturers. We don't claim awards that don't exist, and we'd ask any agency claiming one to name the program.

The work that still exists and still compounds: fast pages, answer-first structure, facts with primary sources, a named author, visible dates, honest measurement. That's what real GEO work looks like — and you can inspect our work yourself, scores and dates included.

In August 2026 we measured 32 agency sites. Eleven of the 25 agencies in that set were still selling or prescribing retired schema. We re-checked all eleven on 2026-08-28: eight are unchanged, one has fixed its page, and two now block us. (Our measurement; the method is available on request.)