Jack Chambers-Ward and Mark Williams-Cook are back in the Candour studio to discuss if People Also Ask questions improve rankings and Google’s recent crackdown on self-promotional listicles.

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They discuss a Chris Green study using AlsoAsked API, SERP scraping, and OpenAI to score whether top-20 ranking pages fully/partially answer related People Also Ask questions, finding a strong correlation in the top five positions, strongest for commercial/transactional queries and weaker for informational/navigational.

The conversation shifts to geographic personalisation in search and AlsoAsked’s city-based selector, plus upcoming talks referencing regional question differences. They then cover major traffic losses seen around late January for sites relying on self-promotional “best X” listicles and programmatic comparison pages, noting some core product pages survived while other pages were suppressed.

Chris Green’s AlsoAsked study:

https://alsoasked.com/insights/paa-ranking-correlation 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9dfEjlmZx0 

Time stamps

00:00 Introduction

01:18 Back in the studio with Mark

02:48 PAA study setup

06:03 Methodology and scoring

08:10 Why commercial queries win

11:58 Regional PAA insights

16:40 Sponsor: Trendos

20:39 Listicle crackdown begins

23:37 Self promo listicles

26:15 Traffic drop fallout

28:57 Honesty beats hype

31:25 Gemini warning cards

34:17 No awards strategy

37:37 Fan out award signals

41:56 Wrap up and upcoming events