Mine People Also Ask for keyword research that still works
People Also Ask boxes are the closest thing to Google publishing its question graph: real follow-up questions, generated from real searches, personalized by market. Each one is a content brief you didn’t have to guess.
The data
A Google Search call returns PAA as a typed block, not something you regex out of HTML:
curl -X POST https://api.answerline.dev/v1/monitor/google \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
-d '{ "prompt": "crm for agencies", "country": "US" }'{ "result": { "peopleAlsoAsk": [
{ "question": "Which CRM is best for small agencies?", "url": "…", "snippet": "…" },
{ "question": "Is HubSpot good for agencies?", "url": "…", "snippet": "…" }
] } }Each entry carries the question plus the URL Google considers the answer — so you learn both what people ask and who currently owns the answer.
A workflow that scales
- Seed set: 20–100 head terms per topic area.
- Expand: each result’s PAA questions become the next round of prompts — two or three levels deep maps a niche completely.
- Cluster: group questions by phrasing; dedupe near-identical ones. What remains is your content outline, ordered by how often Google surfaces each question.
- Assign owners: each PAA entry already names the page Google trusts. If it’s yours, defend it; if it’s a weak forum thread, that’s an easy win.
The AI connection
PAA and AI answers feed each other: the same questions Google surfaces are the prompts buyers paste into ChatGPT, and the fan-out queries AI engines run look like PAA questions. A question map built from PAA doubles as your AI monitoring prompt set — collect both surfaces once and the content plan serves both channels.
Run the expansion as an async batch — a few hundred queries is one call — and diff month over month to watch which questions are rising.