Google is now answering 97 percent of People Also Ask panels with AI Overviews, up from 12 percent fourteen months ago

Google is now answering almost every People Also Ask question on the search results page with an AI Overview, according to two independent samples reported by Search Engine Roundtable on 2026-09-09. Fourteen months ago the share was 12 percent.

The two samples

Also Ask Miner, which tracks Allintitle, puts the figure at 100 percent as of August 2026. AlsoAsked took a sample of 19.2 million English People Also Ask results and told Search Engine Roundtable that 97 percent of PAA answers in the first week of September were AI Overviews, up from 86 percent in August. Both readings measure the People Also Ask block.

Saeed Khosravi flagged the shift, and Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable wrote the piece with the two charts embedded. Search Engine Roundtable also linked back to its earlier post from July 2025, which reported the same share at 12 percent.

What the panel used to do

The old People Also Ask block returned a short quoted answer plus a link to the page it was quoted from, and the click went to that page. The block now returns an AI Overview: a synthesised answer with a citation panel to the side. The click behaves like an AI Overview click, which is fewer clicks to the source in aggregate.

The pattern is the one Google has already run for the main answer box: the box gets fuller, the layout absorbs the block that used to send traffic, and the page below the fold has to compete for the click that remains. This measurement puts People Also Ask on that same curve, and near the top of it.

From a click block to a citation slot

Ranking for a People Also Ask question now means getting cited inside the AI Overview. A page still competes for the same query, and the win condition is that Google's synthesised answer quotes the page or names it in the citation panel. That changes what the page has to look like: passages that stand on their own, answers stated at the top of the section, structured markup that makes the passage safe to lift, and a citation-worthy source line.

The 3 percent that AlsoAsked still shows as non-AI, and the 0 percent that Allintitle shows, are the last of the old block. A team that was tracking People Also Ask impressions in Search Console as a leading indicator now has a metric that measures citation, not clicks, and that is the number worth watching for the rest of the year.

Source

Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable, citing Saeed Khosravi with charts from Also Ask Miner and AlsoAsked.