Conversation with Mark Williams-Cook | Do People Also Ask Questions Improve Rankings? + Google’s Crackdown on Self-Promo “Best” Listicles

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.Sponsored by TrendosNo demo required. No paywall. Free plan available.Check your brand’s AI visibility now → Trendos.comThey 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 stamps00:00 Introduction01:18 Back in the studio with Mark02:48 PAA study setup06:03 Methodology and scoring08:10 Why commercial queries win11:58 Regional PAA insights16:40 Sponsor: Trendos20:39 Listicle crackdown begins23:37 Self promo listicles26:15 Traffic drop fallout28:57 Honesty beats hype31:25 Gemini warning cards34:17 No awards strategy37:37 Fan out award signals41:56 Wrap up and upcoming events