What is People Also Ask?
People Also Ask is the accordion of questions that appears on most Google results pages, usually a few results down. Each row is a question related to what you searched, and clicking one opens a short answer pulled from a web page, with a link to that page. As you open questions, Google adds more, so the box can grow for as long as you keep clicking. It appeared around 2015 and now shows on the majority of informational queries.
The questions come from what people actually type, reorganized by Google's language models into related clusters. Search for a term and the box will show the follow-ups people most often ask next: what it costs, how it compares to something else, whether it is worth it. It is, in effect, a free transcript of the conversation a search leads to.
Why it matters
Why People Also Ask matters
Two reasons. The first is visibility: a page that answers one of those questions clearly can appear in the box on searches where it would never rank in the ten blue links, and the box sits high on the page. The second is research: the questions are the clearest signal available of what an audience wants to know about a subject, straight from the search logs, with no survey needed.
For a brand, the second use is the bigger one. The questions people ask around a product category are the brief for the content that will actually get read, and the objections people search for are the objections the campaign needs to answer.
In practice
How People Also Ask works in practice
- 01
Google selects answers much as it does for featured snippets: a page that states the question, or something close to it, and then answers it directly in a sentence or two, with clear headings and clean HTML. Pages that already rank somewhere near the top for the topic are far more likely to be chosen. FAQ-style sections, with the question as a heading and a plain answer beneath it, are the format that gets picked most.
- 02
The research side is simpler. Search the core terms for a product, a category or a campaign, open the box, keep expanding, and write the questions down. Group them by intent, note which have weak answers, and those become the headings, the FAQ and sometimes the films. Tools can scrape the box at scale, but the first fifty questions gathered by hand are usually the ones that count.
At RIOT
People Also Ask at RIOT
Every term in this glossary ends with a short FAQ, and the questions are chosen from what people actually search around the term rather than what we would like them to ask. They are marked up with FAQ schema so search engines can read them as questions and answers. It is the same thinking we bring to a brand's content: start from the questions the audience already has.
Watch out
What people get wrong about People Also Ask
Stuffing a page with twenty questions and one-line answers to game the box. Google is choosing pages that genuinely answer the question well, and thin FAQ pages tend to get filtered out of the results altogether. Answer the questions that belong on the page, and answer them properly.
The other mistake is ignoring the box as a research tool because it looks like clutter. It is the most direct window into what a market is asking, and it is updated constantly.
