What is People Also Ask?
People Also Ask is the expandable list of related questions on a Google results page, where tapping one reveals an answer excerpt pulled from a page further down the results.
Each question in the list is collapsed by default. Opening it shows a short excerpt from a page, sourced the same way a featured snippet is, and usually adds more questions to the list as you open them. It's Google's way of surfacing the follow-up questions its own data suggests a person is likely to ask next.
For anyone building content, this is useful for a reason that has nothing to do with rankings: the phrasing in People Also Ask is close to how real people actually word a question, not how a keyword tool words it. That makes it a reasonable source of realistic test questions when building a set of prompts to check how a brand shows up across AI answer engines, closer to real usage than questions written from scratch.
Related
- Prompt basketA prompt basket is the fixed set of questions a visibility tool asks engines on your behalf in order to measure how often you are named.
- SERPSERP stands for search engine results page: the full page a search engine returns for a query, which on Google now often stacks an AI-written answer above the traditional list of links.
- Featured snippetA featured snippet is the highlighted answer box at the top of a classic Google results page, built from a short excerpt pulled out of a single ranking page.
Want to know where you actually stand on this? Run a free visibility check or try the free tools.