Two separate measurement firms now agree that Google’s People Also Ask feature has effectively stopped functioning as a classic organic answer box. AlsoAsked found that 97 percent of People Also Ask answers were AI generated in the first week of September, up from 86 percent in August, based on a sample of 19.2 million English-language results collected in 2026. Allintitle, a separate SEO tool, reported the figure at 100 percent starting in August, using data from its own Also Ask Miner tracker.
The two numbers describe the same shift but are not the same measurement. AlsoAsked’s 97 percent comes from a large sample analyzed by founder Mark Williams-Cook, who told Search Engine Roundtable the trend line points toward full saturation soon. Allintitle’s 100 percent comes from founder Saeed Khosravi’s own dataset, shared on LinkedIn, and covers a different sampling window. Neither figure should be read as a stand-in for the other; they are two vendors independently converging on the same conclusion through different methods.
What makes the trend notable is the speed, not just the destination. AlsoAsked’s own tracking put the AI-generated share of People Also Ask answers at roughly 12 percent about 14 months earlier. A feature that ran mostly on extracted snippet text through mid-2025 now runs almost entirely on generated summaries, a shift of roughly 85 percentage points in a little over a year.
People Also Ask has functioned since 2015 as one of the more accessible organic surfaces in Google’s results, a place where a well-structured page could earn visibility without ranking first for the head term. That accessibility is what publishers are now losing. When a AI Overview-style answer fills the box, the underlying source page typically gets a citation link rather than the click volume a traditional snippet placement once carried.
Google has not published its own figures on how much of the People Also Ask surface it now answers generatively, and Search Engine Roundtable’s report includes no confirmation from Google about the mechanism driving the increase. That gap matters: without Google’s own accounting, publishers are relying entirely on third-party sampling to understand how much of this surface remains reachable through traditional optimization.
The practical question for site owners is no longer whether People Also Ask still rewards good FAQ content. It is whether the box still sends any meaningful referral traffic at current generation rates, or whether it has become a citation-only surface similar to how AI Overviews already treat much of the broader results page. A publisher whose visibility strategy still budgets time toward winning individual People Also Ask placements is, based on these numbers, optimizing for a shrinking traffic mechanism even when the optimization succeeds.
Teams that track People Also Ask wins in their reporting should separate “answer won” from “click earned” starting this quarter, since the two increasingly diverge. Anyone still treating a People Also Ask appearance as a proxy for organic traffic should re-run that assumption against Search Console data before the next planning cycle, because the surface AlsoAsked and Allintitle are describing barely resembles the one that metric was built to measure.
Search Engine Roundtable, in a report by Barry Schwartz published September 9, 2026, first reported the AlsoAsked and Allintitle findings.
