I was recently amused by some new Costa Coffee research, highlighted on BBC Radio 4, about the messages parents receive from their children after they head off to university.
Apparently, the average parent of a university student receives 528 ‘SOS’ messages a year, covering everything from money and job interviews to cooking and household bills. Amongst the funny responses read out was something along the lines of “Mum, embarrassing Q, how do I boil an egg?”
With a second-year student about to head back to university, I thought I should probably be forewarned in case a similar WhatsApp lands at my end.
It’s quite touching that so many students still refer to their parents for this day-to-day ‘life’ support but as a non-boiled egg eater, I did what most adults do and turned to Google.
And, rather unexpectedly, it turned into a very neat example of how Google is quietly changing one part of its search results.
A quick refresher on People Also Ask
Search for ‘how do you boil an egg?’ and you’ll see Google’s familiar People Also Ask, or PAA, box.
It’s the collection of related questions that Google thinks you might want to ask next. In my search, these included questions such as “Do I boil eggs on high or low heat?” and “Do eggs need to go into boiling water?”
For years, these boxes have been useful territory for SEO.
Traditionally, when you clicked on one of the questions, Google would display a short snippet of text taken directly from a website, with a link back to the page it came from.
For businesses, that created an opportunity to appear prominently in the search results. You didn’t necessarily need to hold the number one organic position. If Google thought your page provided the best, clearest definition-type answer to a particular question, it could pull that answer into PAA and give your website some very visible additional exposure and visitors.
So what’s changed?
The PAA box is still there. The questions are still there. And, at first glance, it doesn’t look dramatically different. But the answers are changing.
SEO Roundtable asked AlsoAsked about this change. They reported that fourteen months ago, only around 12% of PAA answers were being generated as AI Overviews but that this had reached 97% in the first week of September 2026. Separate data from Allintitle suggests it may already be even closer to 100%.
These aren’t figures from Google itself, but the direction of travel is pretty hard to ignore.
And my boiled egg search illustrates it nicely.
Open those follow-up questions now and Google labels the responses AI Overview. Rather than simply lifting a chunk of text from one website and presenting that as the answer, Google is claiming the answer as an AI-generated response.
There is an important caveat, though.
At the moment, the answers I’m seeing still generally contain a prominent link to a company or website – and in my example, it’s still one per answer (although Allintitle reports seeing more than one per answer). So the opportunity hasn’t entirely disappeared. Google may be generating the words, but a website can still gain visibility, credibility and potentially a click from being cited as the source – even if it may have to share the credit with others.
How long that remains the case, and how prominent those links will continue to be, remains to be seen.
What does that mean for SEO?
For years, one of the aims of SEO was relatively straightforward: create the best destination with the clearest answer to the question someone was asking.
If somebody wanted to know how long to boil an egg, Google needed a webpage that answered precisely that.
That’s not suddenly irrelevant. Google still needs good information from somewhere.
But there is a subtle shift taking place.
Previously, your webpage could provide the answer. Now, increasingly, your webpage may provide the information Google uses to create its answer. That makes being a trusted, useful and authoritative source increasingly important, rather than simply writing the neatest 50-word response to a question.
And PAA itself hasn’t suddenly become useless either. Quite the opposite. Those follow-up questions still tell us an awful lot about what people want to know and what Google considers relevant to their original search.
So I’ll still be looking at People Also Ask when researching content.
And, should the WhatsApp arrive from my eldest, I am now a lot more informed. For a runny yolk: boiling water, six minutes. Cool. Peel. Enjoy.