People Also Ask Is Now Almost Entirely AI-Generated

People Also Ask has quietly stopped being a place where your page gets quoted. Two independent tracking datasets now put AI-generated answers in PAA boxes at between 97% and 100% as of early September 2026 — a feature that, just over a year ago, was pulling roughly 12% of its answers from AI.

What the data shows

Mark Williams-Cook, who runs AlsoAsked, reported figures drawn from a sample of 19.2 million English-language queries made during 2026. His numbers show AI-generated PAA answers at 86% in August 2026, rising to 97% in the first week of September.

Separately, Saeed Khosravi's Also Ask Miner tool at Allintitle recorded 100% AI-generated answers across its tracking from August 2026 onwards.

The two datasets use different samples and different methods, and they land within three percentage points of each other. Set against the roughly 12% figure recorded around 14 months earlier, the trajectory is not a gradual drift — it's a near-total replacement of the feature's answer source inside a single year, with the steepest part of the curve falling in the last two months.

What actually changed

The mechanism matters here. Historically, a PAA answer was an extracted snippet: Google pulled a passage from a ranking page, displayed it inside the accordion, and attributed it with a linked title and URL underneath. Winning a PAA slot was a genuine SEO objective — you optimised a passage to be extractable, and you got a link out of it.

What's replaced that is a generated answer: a synthesised response written by Google's models, drawing on multiple sources, with citation treatment that looks and behaves like AI Overviews rather than like a classic snippet. The answer is no longer a quote from one page that happens to be yours.

This also aligns PAA with the direction Google has taken every other answer surface in the results page. AI Overviews, AI Mode, and now PAA are converging on the same generated-and-cited pattern. PAA is arguably the last of the three to flip, and it has flipped fast.

Why this matters

PAA-slot tracking is measuring something that no longer exists. If you have rank tracking or reporting that counts "PAA appearances" as a win, the underlying thing being counted has changed definition mid-stream. A year-over-year comparison in that metric is not comparing like with like, and any chart showing your PAA presence collapsing over the last two months may be describing the feature's change rather than your performance.

The "answer the question in 40 words to win the box" tactic is spent. Structuring a passage for clean extraction was a rational optimisation when extraction was the mechanism. Where the answer is generated, passage-level formatting no longer wins you the slot — being one of the sources the model draws on and cites does.

Click expectations should be reset downward. Extracted PAA answers carried a prominent attributed link. Generated ones carry AI Overviews-style citations, which sit differently in the interface and, on the evidence of how AI Overviews citations perform, attract proportionally fewer clicks. If PAA was a meaningful traffic source for a set of your informational pages, expect that contribution to be quieter than the impression data suggests.

Long-tail question content changes role. The FAQ-style page built to capture question queries still has a job — but the job is now feeding a generated answer as a citable source, not owning a box. That shifts the value from formatting toward being demonstrably the most credible, most specific source on the question.

What to do about it

Audit which of your pages historically earned PAA visibility and check what's happened to their clicks — not their impressions — since roughly July. Impressions may hold up while clicks fall, and that gap is the story.

Shift the optimisation target from extractability to citation-worthiness. Original data, named expertise, specificity, and clear entity coverage are what get a source pulled into a generated answer. Generic restatement of what everyone else says has no reason to be cited.

Stop reporting PAA presence as a standalone KPI unless you can clearly separate legacy extracted answers from generated ones. Fold it into whatever AI visibility measurement you're already doing, because that's functionally what it now is.

Google has not announced this change, and there's no documentation describing PAA's shift to generated answers. The evidence here is observational tracking from two independent parties, which is worth stating plainly — but two datasets converging on the same near-total figure is about as strong as unannounced-change evidence gets.

Sources

• Google Search Central documentation on AI features in Search
• AlsoAsked dataset (19.2M queries) reported by Mark Williams-Cook on LinkedIn
• Also Ask Miner tracking reported by Saeed Khosravi (Allintitle) on LinkedIn