People Also Ask (PAA)

People Also Ask (PAA) is a Google SERP feature that shows a group of questions related to the search. When you expand a question, Google shows a short answer taken from a web page, with a link to the source, and often adds more questions to the list. Google’s own documentation calls it a “related questions group”.

How it works

MLforSEO explains PAA as one of the features Google builds from aggregated search behaviour, alongside Related Searches and People Also Search For. The questions reflect common transitions between queries within and across sessions, which is why PAA is so useful for studying query sequences and query paths. Google states that site owners cannot control which questions appear; the answer shown when a question is expanded is a featured snippet, so the way to influence it is the same as for featured snippets.

The box is dynamic. Each expansion loads further questions, and the list can drift away from the original topic the more you click.

How it’s used in SEO and marketing

• Intent signal. A PAA box usually points to informational search intent, a useful input for intent classification from SERP data.
• Content outlines. Questions that appear across several keywords show what searchers want to know next, so they make good section headings or FAQ topics.
• Keyword research. PAA questions are one of the data sources for a keyword universe, collected with tools such as AlsoAsked or SERP APIs.
• Query journeys. Recurring questions reveal how users move from one search to the next.

Example

In MLforSEO’s SERP analysis guide, PAA questions come free with the full SERP pull from the DataForSEO API. Asking the API to expand the box one level costs $0.00015 per click and returns about six questions per SERP instead of four (the API allows a click depth of 1 to 4). The workflow then counts each question across keywords and markets, and asks an LLM with structured outputs to group them into themes. In the test, one theme was clearly off-topic: expanding a question led Google to “Can ChatGPT do SEO?”. Filtering that out kept the FAQ section focused. For thousands of questions, the guide recommends embeddings and clustering, with the LLM only naming the clusters.

Limitations and things to watch

• Questions vary by location, language, device and time, so record when and where you collected them.
• PAA shows questions, not demand: there is no search volume attached.
• Drift is common; filter off-topic questions before they reach a brief.
• Since August 2023 Google shows FAQ rich results only for a small set of authoritative government and health sites, so answering PAA questions on a page will not by itself earn FAQ rich results.

Learn it on MLforSEO

• 10 Ways to Automate SERP Analysis with AI shows how to mine and cluster PAA questions.
• What is Search Query Sequence and Query Path? explains where PAA questions come from.
• What Is SERP Feature Analysis? maps PAA and other features to intent.
• The Semantic ML-enabled Keyword Research course uses PAA data in keyword research.