AI SEO Glossary
What is People Also Ask?
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TL;DR - People Also Ask (PAA) is the expandable box of related questions Google embeds in most results pages, each question opening to a short extracted answer from a ranking page and generating further related questions as it's expanded. PAA is both a visibility surface - each answer slot is winnable with snippet-style content - and the best free research tool in search marketing: it is a live, query-specific map of exactly what users ask around a topic, straight from Google's own question graph.
Definition & scope
Winning PAA slots uses the same craft as featured snippets: a heading that matches the question, an immediate self-contained answer, and supporting detail after. FAQ sections built from real PAA questions routinely capture multiple slots per page.
PAA questions also predict AI behavior: the question graph Google exposes there overlaps heavily with how AI engines fan a topic out into sub-queries, so covering PAA questions thoroughly doubles as query fan-out coverage.
Related terms
- Featured Snippet - the same extraction mechanics.
- FAQPage Schema - markup for the Q&A content PAA rewards.
- Query Fan-Out - the AI analogue of the PAA question graph.
Related services
- AEO Services - question-coverage programs built from PAA and prompt data.