AI Search

Google AI-Generated People Also Ask Reaches 97% in September

Google's AI-generated People Also Ask boxes hit 97% coverage in the first week of September 2026, cutting one more organic surface out of B2B research.

By The Pull Desk·Today·5 min read
AI Search

Google AI-Generated People Also Ask Reaches 97% in September

The short version

THE SHORT VERSION: Google's People Also Ask block is now 97% AI-generated as of the first week of September 2026, up from 86% in August. AI-generated People Also Ask has effectively swallowed the block, meaning the classic ten-blue-links funnel for B2B research now runs through Gemini's summarisation layer, not underlying pages.

What happened

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable documented the shift, citing an internal audit that found 97% of People Also Ask results returned AI Overview-style summaries in the first week of September, up from 86% the month prior. That trajectory suggests full AI coverage of the block within weeks. Google has not formally announced the change, matching its pattern from the AI Overviews expansion last year. The People Also Ask block historically drove 8 to 12 percent of long-tail organic traffic for B2B publishers, and its collapse into AI summaries reprices the entire mid-funnel research surface without any accompanying algorithm bulletin.

Why AI-generated People Also Ask matters now

From the publisher

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People Also Ask was the last surface where a B2B founder's blog post could sneak into a research query it did not rank for. The box pulled in secondary URLs, gave them a fair shot, and often drove a click before the searcher ever reached the top of the SERP. Once that entire block runs on AI-generated People Also Ask summaries, the reward for niche content compresses again. Original data and named sources now matter more than keyword coverage, because Gemini quotes specifics and paraphrases generics.

  1. Audit which PAA queries your pages used to win
    Pull the last 90 days of Search Console data and filter for impressions with zero clicks on question-shaped queries. Those are the pages that were surfacing inside People Also Ask, and they are the pages most likely to have lost their expansion slot this month. Prioritise refreshing them with named data first.
  2. Rewrite the answer block near the top of each page
    Gemini tends to lift the first two to three sentences that read like a self-contained answer, then attribute the source. Rewrite the intro of your top ten blog posts as a plain, sourced 40-word answer that names the tool, number, or role. That is the shape AI-generated People Also Ask actually cites, per multiple recent citation audits.
  3. Add original stats or a proprietary benchmark
    AI Overviews and PAA both preference original numbers over commentary. Even one internal customer benchmark, if attributed clearly, becomes the sentence Gemini quotes back to a buyer. Publishers without proprietary numbers lose out to those with a single chart worth citing, regardless of domain authority difference.

By the numbers: Organic click-through rate on AI Overview queries recovered from a 0.61% low in September 2025 to 2.4% by February 2026, per Seer Interactive. The recovery does not reach PAA queries where the AI block sits above the fold and answers the question in full.

What to do this week

Open Search Console, filter to question queries with zero clicks, and pick the top five. Rewrite each page's opening two sentences as a plain sourced answer with a named tool or number in the first fifteen words. Add a single original statistic to each page. Republish under the same URL. Then rerun the same queries inside Google's AI Mode and note which page it now cites; that is your new baseline for the AI-generated People Also Ask era.

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