Google has never published how it picks People Also Ask questions. What we know comes from a few official lines, one detailed Google patent, and years of testing on live results, including our own. If you want the basics of the box first, start with our guide to what People Also Ask is in Google. This page is about the selection: which questions get in, what order they land in, and why more keep appearing every time you click.
What Google itself has said
Not much, and none of it is a recipe. Google’s own name for the feature is “related questions.” A 2017 post on Google’s blog by product manager Michael Galvez lists it among features built “to help you discover more on your journeys through the web,” and adds: “Related questions are labeled ‘People also ask’ in search results.” (Google, December 2017)
Google’s Search Central documentation defines the box as “a cluster of questions that are related to what the user initially searched for” and says that “when a user expands the question, they’re shown a featured snippet.” (Visual Elements gallery) For those snippets, Google says its “systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet for a user’s search request” (Search Central), and its Help Center says it picks them “based on how well they answer your question and how helpful they are.” (Google Search Help)
The closest thing to a mission statement came in February 2017, when Google’s Satyajeet Salgar announced the version of the box that loads new questions as you click: “If you’re in the US and like exploring topics, there’s a nifty feature for you to try with ‘People also ask’ on Google.” (Search Engine Roundtable) Exploring topics. Hold on to that phrase. It explains most of how the box behaves, including the strange parts.
What Google has not said is how it chooses the questions, how it orders them, or how many it will show. For that, we have to look at the patent and at what people have measured.
What do Google’s People Also Ask questions show?
Each row is a question someone could type into Google. Open it and you get a short answer, the page it came from, and a way to run that question as a search of its own. Google’s related-questions patent describes each question as a link “by which a user can obtain search results for a query derived from the text of the selected question.” (US 9,213,748 B1) Then new questions slide in at the bottom of the box.
The answers are changing fast. On 9 September 2026, Search Engine Roundtable reported AlsoAsked data showing 97% of PAA answers in the first week of September were AI Overviews, up from 86% in August and about 12% fourteen months earlier. (Search Engine Roundtable) That shift is about the answers. The questions are a separate pick, and they’re what this page is about. If you care about where the answer text comes from, read where People Also Ask answers come from.
In our harvests on 27 September 2026, all 149 questions we collected came with an answer, 147 of them with a source, and each harvest drew on 30 different source sites. So the box shows you two things at once: which questions Google connects to your topic, and which sites it trusts to answer them.
The patent: questions borrowed from past searches
The most detailed public description is Google’s patent US 9,213,748 B1, “Generating related questions for search queries,” filed in March 2013 and granted in December 2015. Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea connected it to People Also Ask in 2017. (SEO by the Sea) Stripped of patent language, it describes four steps:
- Run your search and take the pages that come back.
- For each of those pages, build “topic sets” from earlier searches that led people to click that page.
- Pull questions from a question database that match those topic sets.
- Rank the matches, remove duplicates, and send the top ones back with your results.
The ranking step is spelled out. The system “ranks the matching questions based on the number of times each question has been submitted to a search engine as a search query.” If two questions mean the same thing, the lower-ranked one is removed. The patent also allows ranking questions on whether they are associated with an answer, which fits a box where every question opens to one. Google was later granted a continuation, US 9,679,027, in June 2017, which Slawski covered under the headline “Google Related Questions now use a Question Graph.” (SEO by the Sea, 2018)
Two things follow from that design. The questions come from real searches, not from an editor. And the link between your search and a question runs through the result pages. If the pages ranking for your search also get clicks from searches about something else, that something else can leak into your box. That is our reading of the patent, not something Google has confirmed, but it matches what we saw in testing.
A patent shows what Google designed, not proof of what runs today, and this one was filed in 2013. STAT’s 2016 study is a useful reality check: when it looked up the 96 unique PAA questions it had collected, 32% showed zero global search volume, which STAT said “seems to suggest that Google is not selecting these questions based on how often they’re searched.” (STAT, 2016) Popularity matters, but it clearly isn’t the whole story. For more on the question side, see where People Also Ask questions come from.
Query refinements and related searches
People Also Ask is one of several ways Google helps you sharpen a search. Semrush’s 2020 study of one million US desktop keywords points to “People also search for” links and Google Suggest as refinement tools, then says: “The ‘People Also Ask’ box is designed for precisely this purpose, too.” It’s needed, the study says, when a search “either is not specific enough to identify their true intent, or perhaps has multiple meanings of which the searcher is unaware.” (Semrush, 2020)
Related searches work differently. Google describes a related searches group as “a cluster of related searches that other people have done,” and clicking one runs a new search. (Visual Elements gallery) PAA questions are phrased as questions and open in place. Both lean on what other people searched. They don’t have to agree, and in our data they didn’t.
When we searched “How does Google determine people also ask?” through the Serper API on 27 September 2026, the related searches stayed close to home: “People Also Ask tool”, “Also asked”, “People Also Ask free”, “People Also Ask extension”. The new questions in its People Also Ask box were “Can I tell who has googled my name?” and “What is Google’s 20% rule?”. Same search, same moment, two very different guesses about what you meant.
When Google shows the box at all
Before any question gets picked, Google decides whether to show the box at all. Usually it does. STAT’s 2023 study of 10,000 head terms in the US and UK, on desktop and mobile, found PAA on over 80% of the results pages it tracked. (STAT, 2023) Semrush found the box shows up more on longer searches: more than 72% of 10-word keywords triggered it, against 47% of 3-word keywords. Question words help too: Semrush found that searches starting with what, why, when, where or who triggered the box 86% of the time.
How Google orders the questions
There is no published order, and the order isn’t stable. In STAT’s 2016 test, the team ran the same keywords a second time. Only 15% of the 79 questions that appeared both times sat in the exact same position, and 12% of the second searches returned all-new questions. STAT’s 2023 follow-up found that about 6,500 of roughly 23,000 unique questions (28%) only ever showed up on one device type.
One pattern does hold up: the questions you see before clicking are the tightest match. In our harvest for “people also ask”, the four visible at the start were all about the box itself: how to get rid of it, how Google determines it, how to use it, and how accurate it is. Everything after that came from clicking, and that’s where it wandered. If the patent’s ranking still applies, the first questions are the strongest matches for the pages that rank for you. Treat the top of the box as Google’s best guess and the bottom as its long tail.
Why the box keeps adding questions as you open them
Because Google built it to. According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google tested the feature from November 2016 before Salgar’s announcement, and when you click a question “Google may dynamically load one or two or more options in that box.” Moz’s Britney Muller, who tracked these endless boxes in 2016 and 2017, wrote that expanding a question makes “2 or 3 other related questions appear at the bottom.” (Moz, 2017)
The new questions follow your clicks, not your original search. Muller found she could steer the box: opening “Can I put my vans in the washing machine?” pulled in more Vans questions, and opening a question about mildew smells pulled in more mildew questions. Her takeaway: “Google caters to browsing patterns in real time.” In effect, each question you open becomes a new seed, and the next questions relate to it, not necessarily to what you typed.
It grows fast. In our harvest for “people also ask”, Google showed 4 questions at the start. To reach 50 unique questions, the harvester had to open about 25 of them (52 confirmed expansions). For the full numbers, whether the box ever runs dry, and how depth levels work, see how many People Also Ask questions Google shows.
Why the questions wander off topic
If every click re-seeds the box, small hops add up. Muller documented one: “What is SMO stands for?” led to “What is the meaning of SMO?” and then to “What is a smo brace?”, the kind you wear on an ankle. One shared word, new topic.
We measured the same effect on 27 September 2026. Of the 50 questions Google revealed for “people also ask”, only 6 were about People Also Ask itself. The first off-topic question showed up at position 5: “Can I tell who has googled my name?” By position 13, Google was asking “Who is the #1 Googled person?” For “people also ask seo”, none of the 50 questions were about PAA. The box followed “SEO” instead. The full sequences, our method, and what it means for your research are in why People Also Ask drifts off topic.
What this means if you research with PAA
- Trust the first layer most. The questions Google shows before any clicks are its closest match to your search.
- Go deeper on purpose. Every layer adds questions and noise at the same time, so decide how deep you need before you start.
- Keep the parent. A question means more when you know which question spawned it. That’s how you spot where a branch left the topic.
- Look more than once. Order and content shift between searches and devices. One snapshot is a sample, not the final word.
That’s the workflow PAA Box is built around. It unpacks the box right on the Google results page at the depth you pick, from D0 (Lid off, just what Google already shows) to D3 (All the way), and exports a CSV that keeps each question’s depth and parent question. You can add it from the Chrome Web Store, where it’s currently listed as “BlogStorm: People Also Ask Tool”.