People also ask stopped quoting pages

People Also Ask is now an AI Overview surface: when a searcher expands a question in the box, Google almost always generates the answer instead of quoting a passage from one page. The box looks the same from a distance. What happens inside it changed this summer, and most question-targeting playbooks still assume the old mechanics.

#What the data shows

Two independent datasets point the same way. AlsoAsked, Mark Williams-Cook's PAA tool, sampled 19.2 million English-language queries made in 2026 and found that 97% of PAA answers in the first week of September were AI Overviews, up from 86% in August. Fourteen months earlier the share was about 12%, according to the same report. Saeed Khosravi's Allintitle tool, sampling separately, put the August figure at 100%. Williams-Cook said it seems likely the box is on track for 100% shortly.

Two caveats before you build on those numbers. Both samples are English-language queries, so other markets may lag. Google has not announced the change, so this is observed behavior measured by third-party tools, not a documented product decision. The direction is still hard to argue with: in a little over a year, the generated answer went from the exception inside PAA to the default.

#How the box used to work

Google's own documentation describes the old model. Featured snippets "can also appear within a related questions group (also known as 'People Also Ask')". That is, an expanded PAA question used to behave like a small featured snippet: one page, one extracted passage, one link.

That model shaped a whole category of advice. Put the question in a heading. Answer it directly underneath. Keep the answer self-contained so the extractor can lift it cleanly. If you won the extraction, you owned that question for everyone who expanded it, and rank trackers could report it as a binary: you held the PAA slot or you did not.

#What replaced it

The new answer is labeled as an AI Overview inside the PAA box, and it can show several supporting sources rather than one extracted passage. The Relevant Audience write-up of the same data notes the same labeling.

Three consequences follow.

Ownership becomes share. A generated answer drawn from several pages has no single owner. Your page can be one of the supporting links, it can contribute a fact without being the most prominent link, or it can be absent while a competitor's phrasing of your idea is used. The binary "we hold the PAA" metric no longer describes anything real.

Eligibility rules change to the AI feature rules. Google's documentation for AI features says that to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet". The same page says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use query fan-out, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics to build a response. A PAA expansion is now one more entry point into that system, not a separate extraction step with its own rules.

The snippet controls cut deeper. Under the old model, some publishers used max-snippet to discourage featured snippets while keeping regular results. The AI features page lists nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex as the controls that limit what Google shows from a page in its AI features. If you tuned these settings years ago to keep a passage out of featured snippets, check what they now do to your eligibility inside PAA.

#What reporting will and will not tell you

Google says AI feature appearances are included in the Performance report under the Web search type. The generative AI performance report that rolled out globally on August 31, 2026 reports impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates, and does not report clicks. None of those dimensions separates a citation inside a PAA expansion from one in the main AI Overview at the top of the page.

That leaves two practical gaps. First, a page that used to win PAA extractions may show a change in Search Console that you cannot attribute to the box specifically. Second, any rank tracker that still records "PAA owned" as a feature win is likely reporting a format that has nearly disappeared. Ask your vendor how they classify an expanded PAA answer that carries an AI Overview label and multiple sources, and whether that classification changed in August.

#What to do with your question pages

Question research is still useful. The PAA box remains a free list of the related questions Google associates with a topic, which is close to the subtopics a fan-out search would explore. What changes is how you write for those questions and how you measure the result.

1. Keep direct answers, but stop writing for a single extraction. A clean first sentence still helps any system that summarizes the page. The goal is now to be a source the generated answer needs, which favors specific, checkable facts (thresholds, dates, named steps, prices with their conditions) over a polished paraphrase of common knowledge.
2. Cover the question cluster, not the single question. Because the answer is assembled from several pages and fan-out searches, a page that answers the neighboring questions with concrete detail has more chances to contribute than a page tuned to one phrasing.
3. Audit your snippet controls. List every template that uses nosnippet, max-snippet or data-nosnippet. For each one, decide whether that restriction is still worth the AI feature visibility it costs.
4. Expand the box during audits. For your priority questions, open each PAA item on a logged-out session, record whether the answer is generated, and log which URLs appear as sources. Repeat on a schedule, because a single check says little about a generated surface.
5. Annotate August 2026. If your question-led pages moved in late summer, the PAA change belongs on the timeline next to the September spam update and the other AI feature changes. Without the annotation, someone will attribute the movement to content quality.
6. Report source share, not slot ownership. For each question cluster, track how often your domain appears among the cited sources across repeated checks, and how often a named competitor does. That is the number the new box actually produces.

#The short version

PAA used to be a quoting engine with one winner per question. It is now a generation surface that cites a set of sources. The questions in the box still tell you what people want to know. The way to win them is the same way you win any AI Overview: be indexed, be snippet-eligible, and publish the specific facts that a generated answer cannot write without you.