Fourteen months ago, roughly 12% of the answers inside Google’s “People also ask” box were AI generated.
This week we found out the number is 97%.
Not a prediction. Not a hot take on LinkedIn. Two separate datasets, checked against each other.
What actually happened
Saeed Khosravi from Allintitle posted that their Also Ask Miner data showed Google’s People Also Ask answers went fully AI generated starting August 2026.
Barry Schwartz took that claim to Mark Williams-Cook at AlsoAsked, the tool that measured it at 12% fourteen months ago. Mark ran it against a sample of 19.2 million English queries.
His answer: 97% in the first week of September, up from 86% in August. His words were that we are “on track for 100% shortly”.
So one tool says 100%, the more conservative dataset says 97%. Either way the argument is over.
Why this one matters more than the usual Google noise
Think about how a lot of Nigerian sites were built.
You pick a question people actually type. “How much does it cost to register a business in Nigeria.” “Best POS machine for small business.” “How much do digital marketers earn in Lagos.”
You write a clean answer. You rank. The PAA box pulls your line, someone taps it, they click through.
That box was free real estate for anybody without a budget for backlinks. It was how a one-person blog in Aba could sit on the same screen as a bank.
Now the box answers for itself, and your name sits under it as a footnote.
The part nobody wants to say out loud
If your traffic strategy was “answer the question better than the next person”, that strategy is now competing with a machine that answers it first, on the same page, for free.
I am not going to pretend that is fine.
But I have watched this pattern for three years now, and the people who get wiped out are always the ones who only answered the question. The ones who survive gave the reader something the box cannot lift.
What I would do this month
1. Answer the question in your first 40 words. Get it over with. You are not going to beat the box by hiding the answer in paragraph nine, you are just going to lose the reader too.
2. Then earn the click with what AI cannot copy. Your actual naira figures. Your screenshots. The bank that rejected you. The supplier who ghosted you. Receipts.
3. Move budget toward queries where the person must click to finish the job. Application links. Current prices you personally paid. Suppliers with phone numbers. Tools you tested this month. A summary cannot complete those tasks.
4. Open Search Console and compare impressions against clicks on your question posts. A page sitting at position 9 with hundreds of impressions and no clicks is not a ranking problem. It is a “Google already answered it” problem, and the fix is the offer on the page, not more words.
One more thing from the same week
John Mueller spent Monday warning people off programmatic SEO, saying it “often leads to a site that’s either spam, borderline spam, or low quality”, and that Google’s systems can lose faith in a site based on those pages.
Put the two stories side by side and the message is not subtle. Spinning up 400 thin question pages was already a bad plan. Now the box answers all 400 of them anyway.
Fewer pages. Better proof. That is the whole play for the rest of 2026.
This is the kind of change we pull apart live in the community every week. Come through → digitrybe.com/community
Sources: Search Engine Roundtable, 7 and 9 September 2026; AlsoAsked (19.2M query sample) and Allintitle Also Ask Miner via LinkedIn; John Mueller on Bluesky.
