People Also Ask

Each question opens onto a snippet. Google describes the related questions group as a cluster of questions related to what the user searched for, and says that a user who expands one is shown a featured snippet^[1]. Its page on featured snippets says the same from the other side: they can appear within the group^[2].

It is algorithmic. Search Console’s help describes People Also Ask sections as algorithmic suggestions by Google that give information from, and a link to, a site, and sets them apart from FAQ rich results, which a site codes with structured data^[3]. Google says you cannot control what shows up in these exploration features, but that the related questions are worth watching when choosing topics to write about^[1].

It is counted only when opened. When a searcher expands a question, Search Console records an impression for the links inside it; expanding is not a click, while following a link to the site from the expanded answer is, and standard position rules apply^[3]. An answer of yours in a question nobody opens earns nothing in the report.

The questions are a map of what searchers ask next, the same shape as the parts of a question an AI answer covers, so a page that answers them well serves both. The work is the one described under query fan-out.

From our practice: the questions to answer come first from what customers already ask, by email, phone and chat, then from People Also Ask and Search Console queries.

Every answer in the box is text that Googlebot could read. In QueryRev’s study, 190 of the 9,973 domains of the panel, 1.9%, close the whole site in the catch-all group, the rules every crawler without a group of its own obeys^[4]; unless their robots.txt gives Googlebot a group of its own, their pages cannot supply the text of an answer.

Watch the box for the queries you care about: which questions it shows, which pages answer them and whether one is yours. The questions change with the query, the place and the device, so record them per tracked query on a schedule.

In Search Console, an answer of yours counts as an impression when its question is opened and as a click when its link is followed^[3]. Read the queries a page earns impressions for at positions where the box appears.

Collect the questions. The set the box shows for a topic, gathered over weeks, is a list of follow-up questions to answer on the pages that own the topic.

Sample data: an invented site, to show the method.

An accounting software company tracks “how to do bookkeeping for a small business”. The box shows four questions: a competitor answers two, a government site one and an accounting blog one. None of the answers is the company’s, though its guide touches three of the four in passing.

The guide gains three headings phrased as the questions, each followed by a two-sentence answer and then the detail. Over the next weeks the box is read again for the same query.