If you track how different SERP features generate organic traffic for your website, you may have noticed a sudden dip in how much traffic you get from the People Also Ask section.
What Is The People Also Ask Section on Google, & How Do You Rank In It?
People Also Ask is a SERP feature. In situations where an initial query has related queries (something Google is able to track through macro-trends in its user base), Google can include those relevant questions and source short answers. For example, if you were to search for “how far away is the sun”, you would see other questions in a People Also Ask section related to astronomy, including “how far away is the moon” or “how long would it take to get to the sun”.
Traditionally, those answers were sourced by relying on content written on other websites. As such, links to those websites are included in the accordion when you expand any individual question. The best method to rank in these SERP features was to align your content to relevant questions. A common strategy was to create FAQ sections with FAQ schema markup so that search engines could quickly identify questions and answers present on your website.
What Has Changed with The “People Also Ask” Section on Google in 2025?
First and foremost, Google is prioritizing its AI tools. While People Also Ask is traditionally placed in the middle of the page, the AI Overview section is frequently placed at the top of the page. An AI overview will often cover both the original question asked and the relevant questions in the People Also Ask section, making that section less valuable. People Also Ask’s lower position on the page and redundancy with AI Overviews are leading fewer users to open it. Moreover, a recent analysis of millions of searches found that Google answered questions in People Also Ask sections with its own AI instead of with content directly sourced from other websites. Taken together, this has led to large dips in website traffic from search engines, especially for content that was designed to rank for people also ask sections.
What Does this Mean for SEO & GEO Strategies
If you are starting to notice large dips in organic traffic, you should check which pages are leading to those dips. It may be the case that you are seeing decreases in blog traffic to blogs that used to perform well. Five years ago, this would usually signal that your blog got outranked by a newer blog, but nowadays it is usually a sign that the content of your blog is now being used to source answers for Gemini and other LLMs without sending users to your site. This is not necessarily a bad thing. As worrying as it sounds that your website could see decreases in traffic, the relationship between Google, LLMs, and businesses is more or less the same. In the past, we created optimized content that was beneficial to search engines and their users to draw people to our sites so that the traffic could be converted into business opportunities. In the current state, we can create optimized content that is valuable to search engines, LLMs, and their users, which can answer questions effectively. When users then ask for recommendations on businesses within those dialogues, it is likely they will be sent to the source of that information.
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