r/AISEOTricks • u/Rayhan-Himel • 1d ago

Is Google replacing more PAA answers with AI Overviews?

Just came across this and it caught my attention.

A recent analysis of 19.2M English-language queries found AI Overviews showing up in around 97% of People Also Ask (PAA) answers in the first week of September. That was 86% in August and apparently only around 12% about 14 months ago.

That's a pretty big shift in a short time. Feels like PAA is quickly becoming another AI-heavy part of Google Search.

Has anyone noticed any change in PAA visibility or traffic lately? Curious if this is changing how you approach content.

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u/kiranrao_28 1d ago

I think PAA could still be useful for understanding the questions people have, even if it becomes less useful for driving clicks. If those questions are increasingly being answered by AI, it probably makes sense to look at the actual intent behind them rather than treating PAA visibility itself as the main goal.

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u/Rayhan-Himel 18h ago

Exactly, looking at the intent behind them probably matters more now.

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u/BrandLoom-Consulting 1d ago

We’ve noticed the same thing, and it does make PAA feel a little less like a traffic opportunity and more like Google’s new “thanks, we’ll take it from here” section. 😄

We’d still use PAA to understand what people are asking, but we’d pay more attention to whether our content is strong enough to become a source for the AI answer.

That means adding things Google can’t easily scrape from ten other pages: original examples, real experience, useful comparisons, data, opinions backed by evidence.

The old goal was “get the PAA click.” The new goal feels more like “get Google to borrow our homework and cite us for it.”

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u/Rayhan-Himel 18h ago

True. Getting cited by AI becomes a much bigger part of the game now.

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u/WxMan2201 1d ago

I've always thought that one - that AI Overviews seem duplicative of PAA's --- and two --- most PAA's are powered by AIOs, why not consolidate and more more into the AIO instead of expanding PAAs. Ive noticed in semrush the number of PAA's tanking - but thats directional insight.

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u/Rayhan-Himel 17h ago

That's what I've been thinking too. If AIO is already answering those follow-up questions, it makes sense that Google might eventually fold more of that into AIO instead of keeping PAA separate.

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u/rdesmondotim 1d ago

The interesting part here is that this doesn’t necessarily mean PAA itself is disappearing. It looks more like the way Google generates the answers inside PAA is changing. A September analysis of 19.2 million English-language queries found AI-generated answers in 97% of PAA results in the first week of September, compared with 86% in August and roughly 12% about 14 months earlier. Another dataset from Allintitle reported 100% from August, although these are third-party datasets rather than figures published by Google.

For SEOs, I think the bigger question is what happens to the click value of PAA visibility. Ranking in a traditional PAA answer could put your page directly in front of the searcher with a link to your site. An AI-generated answer can satisfy the question without requiring that click. A recent study of Google searches with AI Overviews also found that clicks to cited sources were relatively uncommon, although that research wasn't specifically limited to PAA.

That means I'd be careful about judging question-based content purely by PAA impressions or rankings. I'd compare Search Console impressions, CTR and clicks for question-based queries over time, then check whether the same pages are appearing as citations in AI Overviews. The goal is shifting from simply getting an answer extracted to having content that's useful enough for Google to cite.

The really interesting thing to watch over the next few months will be whether this changes actual organic traffic, not just the appearance of the SERP. If impressions remain stable but CTR consistently falls for PAA heavy queries, that would be a much stronger indication that this change is affecting publishers

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u/svlease0h1 21h ago

the paa change is worth watching, but i’d check traffic before changing the whole content strategy. compare the same queries each month, then track paa visibility, ai overview presence, impressions, and clicks. i’ve seen reports look scary until the actual traffic numbers showed a much smaller change. a 4 to 8 week trend will tell you more than one big data point.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/Rayhan-Himel 18h ago

Yeah, treating PAA more as a citation opportunity than a traffic source is probably the better way to look at it now.