This is the method behind our guide to using Google’s People Also Ask box, and behind this whole site. Four steps: unpack, filter, map, link. Then a look at how this site was planned with them.
Step 1: Unpack the tree to a useful depth
People Also Ask is a tree, not a list. Open a question and Google adds more below it: children of the one you opened. That parent-to-child link is the most useful thing in the box, so keep it.
PAA Box names the depth levels after how far you open the box:
- D0 Lid off: only the questions Google already shows. About 5 seconds.
- D1 One layer: opens each of those once. About 10 seconds.
- D2 Two layers: about 30 seconds.
- D3 All the way: about 1 to 2 minutes.
Those are questions-only timings. With answers (Google’s answer and source for every question, a PAA Box Pro feature), it’s about 30 seconds, 1 minute, 4 minutes and 12 minutes. For one article, a shallow unpack is usually plenty. For a pillar and its cluster, go deeper, because step 2 throws a lot away.
By hand it’s slow: to get from 4 visible questions to 50 unique ones, our research harvest had to open about 25 questions (52 confirmed expansions). If you go manual, note each new question’s parent the moment it appears.
Step 2: Filter the drift
The tree does not stay on topic. On 27 September 2026 we unpacked the box for “people also ask” and collected 50 questions. Only 6 were about People Also Ask. The first off-topic one arrived at position 5 (“Can I tell who has googled my name?”), and by position 13 Google was asking “Who is the #1 Googled person?”. The search “people also ask seo” went further: 50 questions, zero about People Also Ask. We dig into the reasons in why People Also Ask drifts off topic.
Sort every question into a pile:
- Keep it if a reader of your topic would plausibly ask it.
- Merge it if it rewords a question you already kept. Our research turned up “Where do the people also ask come from?” and “Where do the people also ask questions come from?”. That’s one question.
- Drop it if it’s a detour. In our deeper pass, 49 child questions landed here. Some core questions, like “How does Google determine people also ask?”, returned no on-topic children at all (Google offered “What is Google’s 20% rule?”).
Step 3: Map what’s left into an AKA plan
AKA stands for Authority, Knowledge, Answer. Three page types, stacked the way the tree is:
- Authority: one pillar page for the broad topic, pointing to every sub-topic.
- Knowledge: a page per sub-topic, under the pillar. Good candidates are questions Google shows for your seed search that have plenty of on-topic children.
- Answer: one page per specific question, placed under the parent question Google spawned it from.
Every page gets three fields before anyone writes:
- A primary question. It becomes the H1, and the first two sentences answer it.
- Folded questions. Close variants that don’t deserve their own page. Each becomes an H2 on this one.
- A parent. The page it sits under. Only the pillar has none.
Here’s a slice of the plan behind this site:
| Type | Primary question | Folded in as an H2 | Parent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authority | What is People Also Ask in Google? | What is the People Also Ask section of Google? Why does Google have People Also Ask? | None |
| Knowledge | How do you get rid of People Also Ask on Google? | How do I remove People Also Ask from Google? | The pillar |
| Answer | Is the People Also Ask section AI? | Are People Also Ask answers AI? | How do you get rid of People Also Ask on Google? |
Folding matters as much as the pages. The two turn-off questions in that table want the same answer. As two pages they’d chase one question. Folded, the question has one home.
Step 4: Link parents and children both ways
A plan only becomes a site when the links follow the tree:
- Every child page links to its parent in its first paragraph, with anchor text that says what the parent covers.
- Every parent page links to each child in the body, at the H2 where that child’s topic comes up.
- Siblings and other branches get a link only when it truly helps the reader.
Why it matters: a reader can move from broad to specific and back. From the pillar they click down; from a narrow answer they click up. No dead ends.
A crawler gets the same map. Google says it “uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl,” and that “every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site” (Google’s link best practices). A tree where every page links up and down meets that by design. Google’s SEO Starter Guide also suggests you “group topically similar pages in directories,” which is what the nested URLs here do.
And every question has exactly one home. When two of your pages chase the same question, Google has to choose between them and your links get split across both. Google says duplicate content isn’t a spam violation, but “it can be a bad user experience and search engines might waste crawling resources.” One question, one URL avoids that.
The worked example: this site
You’re reading the output. This site’s plan started from one seed search, “people also ask,” and became 26 pages: 1 Authority page, 6 Knowledge pages and 19 Answer pages.
The pillar is our guide to what People Also Ask is. Four of the six Knowledge pages are questions Google showed us in the box for that seed search. “How to get rid of people also ask on Google?” was the very first question in it, so it became how to get rid of People Also Ask, a Knowledge page under the pillar.
The Answer pages below follow Google’s own edges. When we searched “How to get rid of people also ask on Google?”, the People Also Ask box for that search included “Are the people also ask section AI?” (Google’s grammar, not ours). So our page on whether People Also Ask is AI sits under the turn-off page, not under the accuracy branch where you might guess it belongs. Google connected those two questions, so we did too. The same thing placed a sibling of this page: Google showed “Why is the ‘People also ask’ section not working?” under “How to use Google People also Ask?”, so why People Also Ask isn’t working lives in this branch.
Not every page came from an edge, and the plan records which didn’t. This page is placed by the method itself; the pages on keyword research, ranking and exporting came from their own seed searches. When Google gives you a clean edge, use it. When it drifts, place the page where a reader would look.
Doing it with PAA Box
You can run this method in a spreadsheet today. PAA Box’s free CSV export already keeps the tree: every row carries its depth, the question and its parent question (plus Google’s answer and source in Pro’s answers mode). Sort by parent and you can see which questions hang off which. That’s most of step 3.
PAA Box Pro, coming soon, builds the AKA plan for you, grouping a question stack into Authority, Knowledge and Answer pages, each with its parent. Pro will cost $7 for the first 7 days, then $90 a year; leave your email to hear when it goes on sale. The free extension is live now in the Chrome Web Store as BlogStorm: People Also Ask Tool; PAA Box is the same tool, being rebranded.