PAA is dead. Long live AI Overviews
If you've spent the last couple of years building your content strategy around the "People Also Ask" block — I've got bad news for you. Search Engine Roundtable just published a number that should sober anyone up: 97% of PAA answers are now generated by AI Overviews. A year ago it was 12%. Fourteen months — and the market flipped upside down. It'll hit 100% soon, and that's not a forecast anymore. That's just arithmetic of the trend.
Let's be honest: PAA was never a goldmine of traffic, but it was a clear mechanic. You answered a user's question short and sharp, landed in the results, got a click or at least some brand visibility. Now that spot is occupied not by your snippet, but by Google's synthesis pulled from dozens of sources. Your text might not even get cited — it just gets digested and spat back out as a faceless answer.
You're no longer competing with websites
This is the key mental shift you need to make right now. Before, you were fighting other domains for position — whose structure was cleaner, whose markup was tighter, whose link profile was stronger. Now your main competitor in this space is an algorithm that compiles other people's content faster than you can write it.
And here's what matters: AI Overviews is good at exactly one thing — summarizing. It takes publicly available facts, averages out the phrasing, and produces a smooth but generic answer. It's bad at the thing that actually matters: anything that needs unique context nobody else has but you.
What AI still can't synthesize
Primary data. If you ran your own research, gathered stats specific to your niche, tested something in practice — that can't be "averaged," because it exists in exactly one place. AI can cite your numbers. It can't invent them for you.
Firsthand experience — the "I did this, and here's what happened" kind of story. A personal observation with real specifics doesn't get synthesized out of ten similar articles, because it simply isn't in those ten similar articles.
Comparison tables with real parameters you collected by hand, not copied from someone else's aggregator. Complex cases with actual numbers and conditions, where there's no one-size-fits-all answer.
A standard FAQ block that answers a question in three generic sentences — that, AI will reproduce perfectly. Because that IS the perfect material for synthesis: short, generalized, zero uniqueness.
What to actually do about it
Stop writing content with a PAA click as the main goal. That tactic burned itself out right in front of our eyes — in a little over a year.
The focus shifts to where AI physically cannot replace you: positions 1-3 in organic, direct visits, content people read not for a single fact but for the breakdown, the opinion, the context. It's slower and harder than cranking out an FAQ page in an hour, but it's the only thing that won't get devalued by the next algorithm update.
For YMYL topics and e-commerce this is especially critical — where the user's decision depends on trust in the source, not on how fast they got the fact. A bare fact, AI will hand out for free. Trust — it won't.
It's all like sports: whoever played for short distances and easy wins is losing ground the fastest right now. Whoever built depth is buying time.
If you need to rebuild your content strategy for the new reality of search, instead of patching something that already stopped working — you can start with an audit and consultation.