This is the first-party research behind our explainer on how Google determines People Also Ask. We kept opening Google’s box until it gave us 50 questions, then followed single questions three levels down. Both ways, the box left the topic within a few questions and rarely came back.
How we tested
On 27 September 2026 we ran three PAA harvests on live Google results (US, English, desktop) with the mcp-scraper harvest_paa tool, which expands the box by clicking questions open, the way a person would. The searches were “people also ask”, “people also ask tool” and “people also ask seo”. We then ran a depth pass of 65 more searches through the Serper API. It started from 18 on-topic seeds (questions from the harvests plus a few core searches). Each was searched on its own, and the questions in its own PAA box were recorded as its children, down to three levels. A keyword filter dropped children that had nothing to do with PAA, search features, SEO or content research.
What we found
| Search | Questions revealed | About PAA itself | First off-topic question |
|---|---|---|---|
| people also ask | 50 | 6 | Position 5 |
| people also ask tool | 49 | 5 | Position 2 |
| people also ask seo | 50 | 0 | None on topic (all general SEO) |
That’s 11 relevant questions out of 149. The feature wasn’t broken. Every question still came with an answer, 147 of the 149 had a source, and each harvest drew on 30 different source sites. No AI Overview appeared on any of the three result pages either.
One search, question by question
Here is how “people also ask” unfolded, in the order Google revealed the questions:
| Position | Question | About PAA? |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 4 | How to get rid of people also ask on Google? / How does Google determine people also ask? / How to use Google People also Ask? / How accurate is the “People also ask” information? | Yes (the four visible before any clicks) |
| 5 | Can I tell who has googled my name? | No |
| 6 | What to never ask Google Assistant? | No |
| 7 | What is the #1 most searched thing on Google? | No |
| 8 | Where do the people also ask come from? | Yes |
| 11 | Are people also ask AI? | Yes, and the last one |
| 13 | Who is the #1 Googled person? | No |
| 50 | What is black Google? | No |
After position 11, the next 39 questions had nothing to do with People Also Ask. Most fell into three neighborhoods: privacy and people looking each other up (“Can I see who googled me?”, “Can people know you looked them up?”), most-searched trivia (“What’s the most Googled question of all time?”), and Google’s rivals (“What is Google’s biggest enemy?”, “Why are people not using Google anymore?”).
Google did it again, one question at a time
The depth pass took clicking out of the picture and asked Google each question directly. The drift didn’t change. When we searched “How does Google determine people also ask?”, none of the new questions in its box were on topic. Google offered “Can I tell who has googled my name?”, the same hop the click harvest made at position 5, and “What is Google’s 20% rule?”. More examples from the pass:
- “Why does Google have people also ask?” led to “Who is the biggest enemy of Google?”
- “how to export people also ask questions” led to “Can I export my Google search history?”
- “people also ask chrome extension” led to “What are the potential risks of using Google Chrome extensions?”
- “Does AI Overview ever lie?” led to “Does AI ever intentionally lie?” and “Can I trust AI to tell the truth?”
In total, the filter dropped 49 child questions as off topic. Two different methods, the same wandering.
Why it drifts
Google hasn’t explained this, so what follows is our reading, based on its patent, earlier research and our own data.
- Each click is a new seed. Google loads questions related to the one you opened, not to what you typed. Moz’s Britney Muller showed in 2017 that you can steer the box just by choosing which questions to open. (Moz)
- Shared words build bridges. “Export” jumped to exporting your search history. “Chrome extension” jumped to extension risks. Muller watched “What is the meaning of SMO?” turn into “What is a smo brace?”.
- The result pages set the neighborhood. Google’s related-questions patent picks questions using earlier searches that led people to the pages ranking for your query. (US 9,213,748 B1) On our test day, the top two organic results for “people also ask” were a Facebook post titled “People also ask What happened to Jamaica in the 1970s?” and a page about transferring airtime in South Sudan. Messy results give the box messy raw material.
- Broad questions win the ranking. The same patent ranks matching questions by how often they are searched. If that still applies, broad questions about Google itself will keep beating narrow questions about one search feature. That matches what we saw, and it would explain why “people also ask seo” followed SEO and never came back.
None of this is new. In STAT’s 2016 study, a box for “SEO Canonicalization” eventually served up “Who is Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum?”. (STAT)
The lesson for researchers
- Control depth. The good questions sat near the top. In the “people also ask” harvest, 5 of the 6 relevant questions were in the first 8. Deeper layers add volume faster than relevance.
- Filter before you plan. A raw PAA export is not a list of your audience’s questions. Tag or drop off-topic rows before they reach a content plan.
- Keep the parent question. When you know which question spawned which, you can cut a whole branch where drift starts instead of judging every row.
- Don’t read totals as demand. 50 questions for “people also ask” meant 6 useful ones.
PAA Box is built around these habits. You choose the depth, from D0 (Lid off, just what Google shows) to D3 (All the way), and the CSV keeps depth and parent question for every row, so drifting branches are easy to spot and prune. To see how fast each level grows, read how many People Also Ask questions Google shows.