For years, the People Also Ask box was one of the most practical wins in search. Write a clean answer to a common question, rank well enough, and Google would lift your paragraph into the accordion with your link underneath. One question, one page, one winner.
That box has changed underneath everyone, and two independent datasets now show how fast.
The numbers, from two sources that did not coordinate
AlsoAsked analysed 19.2 million live English-language PAA results from 1 January to 7 September 2026. Its founder, Mark Williams-Cook, published the monthly share answered by AI Overviews: 22% in January, 24% in February, 14% in March, 11% in April, then 40% in May, 64% in June, 61% in July, 86% in August, and 97% in the first week of September.
Separately, Allintitle's Saeed Khosravi reported that as of August 2026 PAA answers in its data are 100% AI-generated. On a sample of about 6,000 PAA questions, the older endpoint that served single-source answers succeeded around 70% of the time through May, fell to 25.8% by the end of July, and stopped entirely in August.
Search Engine Roundtable put the two side by side on 9 September. For scale, AlsoAsked's own earlier study, reported by Search Engine Land in July 2025, had the AI share at nearly 13%.
This was not a slow drift
The shape matters more than the headline. The AI share actually fell between February and April. Then, between May and August, it went from 40% to 86%, and Allintitle's data shows the old endpoint failing over the same months.
That is a switch being thrown, not a trend being ridden. A PAA playbook written in the spring was written for a format that no longer exists.
What actually changed about the answer
The old PAA answer was extractive. Google quoted one passage from one page and linked it. If that was your page, you owned the answer.
The new answer is generated. Khosravi describes it as an AI Overview style response with a carousel of several sources. So the box went from one winner to shared citation. You can still be in it, but you are one voice among several, and the wording is Google's, not yours.
We made the same distinction on our page comparing AI Overviews and featured snippets: a snippet rewards the best single passage from a page that already ranks, while an Overview rewards being useful enough to cite. PAA has now crossed from the first model to the second.
What to do with that
Three practical consequences, all following from the mechanism rather than the percentage:
- Stop reporting "PAA wins" as owned positions. A citation in a generated answer is not the same asset as a quoted snippet, and it should not sit in the same row of a report.
- Write answers that survive being merged. A clear, specific, self-contained claim is easier to cite alongside other sources than a paragraph that only makes sense on your page.
- Check what your tracking counts. Khosravi's warning is that a tool which measures the AI Overview at the top may not be measuring the ones nested inside PAA. Ask before you trust the number.
One caution on the figures. Williams-Cook expects 100% "shortly", which is a forecast. The measured numbers are 97% for one week in September from AlsoAsked, and 100% for August from Allintitle. Both point the same way. Neither is the whole of Google.
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