AI now writes 97% of People Also Ask answers, AlsoAsked finds

Almost every answer in the People Also Ask box on Google is now written by AI. AlsoAsked looked at 19.2 million English-language searches made in 2026. In the first week of September, 97% of the answers in the box came from AI. In August the share was 86%. Fourteen months ago it was 12%.

The box that used to quote a page now writes its own text

People Also Ask is the list of related questions Google shows inside its results page. Open one and a short answer appears with a link below it. For years that answer was a snippet cut out of somebody else’s page. Now it is generated text, the same kind Google puts into AI Overviews, the summaries above the results.

AlsoAsked counts 97%, Allintitle counts every answer

Mark Williams-Cook of AlsoAsked published the figures. He said it “seems highly likely we are on track for 100% shortly”. A second tool went further. Saeed Khosravi of Allintitle said data from its Also Ask Miner tool shows that from August 2026 every answer in the box is AI-generated. The two firms count differently, but they point the same way. Barry Schwartz reported both readings in Search Engine Roundtable on 9 September.

Publishers lose a slot that paid without a top ranking

The box used to be a chance for pages that did not sit at the top of the results. A clear question with a short answer under it was often enough to win the slot and the visit that came with it. When Google writes the answer itself, the link stays but the reason to press it gets weaker.

Two checks are worth doing. The first is how many visits the question-and-answer pages still bring, which the AI Overviews report in Search Console can show. The second is whether the site appears as a source under the generated answer at all, because that is now the visible reward. The models behind these answers change every few weeks; Google put Gemini 3.8 Flash into AI Mode in August. Newsrooms are already moving people because of it, as USA Today did with its audience desk.