PAA & AI Prompt Miner
Mine the real questions and prompts people ask about a topic (via Google Autocomplete) so you can answer them and get cited by AI. Free, no API key.
PAA & AI Prompt Miner for the list you actually have to act on
You've been handed 'write for AI search' as an objective and a Search Console export as the only input. We mine the real People Also Ask questions for your topic — not invented 'AI prompt volume', which no engine publishes to anyone — and show you which of Google's own documented mechanisms sit underneath them, so you know which questions deserve 40 words, which deserve an H2, and which deserve nothing at all.
Built and reviewed by Sayed Hasan, founder of SEOs Hut · Updated 28 September 2026 · Free, no signup
What is the best source for AI prompts?
People Also Ask, plus your own Search Console query list — both are real, sourced, and visible to you directly. 'AI prompt volume' as a metric is not published by any engine: Bing shows an explicit sample of grounding queries, Gemini's API exposes only the queries one call executed, and Google's generative-AI report has no query dimension at all. Anything claiming a bigger number is an estimate dressed as data.
'AI prompt volume' is not a real metric, and no engine will hand you one
No AI company publishes prompt strings or prompt counts to the public. Microsoft publishes an explicit sample of grounding queries in Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report, and says so in its own documentation. Gemini's API exposes only the queries one specific call executed, not a population. Google's Generative AI performance report has no query dimension at all. Every 'ChatGPT prompt volume' figure you'll see quoted is therefore a panel estimate, a model's guess, or marketing copy — not a measurement, however confidently it's presented.
What actually sits underneath 'best project management software for small teams'
Four layers, from what you can see directly to what you can only infer exists. Each one gets a different treatment on the page.
What a buyer actually types, visible in your own Search Console query list. This is the layer your FAQ and answer paragraph should address in the visitor's own words.
Google's People Also Ask expansions, visible on the SERP and scrapeable directly. Each click reveals more, so the branch has no fixed size — a stable, recurring branch is a candidate for its own H2, not a new page.
Google documents that AI Mode and AI Overviews expand a seed query into several concurrent related queries — its own published example turns "how to fix a lawn that's full of weeds" into "best herbicides for lawns", "remove weeds without chemicals" and "how to prevent weeds in lawn". You can't see your own topic's exact fan-out, only that the mechanism runs. Write for the seed and trust the rewrite to route back.
OpenAI documents that ChatGPT rewrites a prompt into one or more targeted queries before sending them to named search partners, and that stored memory changes the rewrite. The rewritten string itself is never shown to you.
The only engine that publishes anything resembling real prompt data to publishers — and its own documentation states plainly that this is a sample of overall citation activity, not the full population. Worth checking periodically; never worth building a single piece of content around.
The one place in this whole chain where you see the real executed query, not an estimate — if you're building specifically for Gemini-grounded answers, this is the layer worth quoting as measured.
Google names the exact failure mode of a PAA-scraping content plan
“While it might be tempting to create separate content for every possible variation of how people might search (for example, by focusing on other queries that people have asked, or fan-out queries), doing so primarily to manipulate rankings or generative AI responses in Google Search violates Google's scaled content abuse spam policy.”
<b>Google Search Central, AI optimization guide</b> — Google Search Central
Four traps in the order they cost you
The first one is a named policy violation, not a judgement call. The rest cost time rather than rankings.
Writing a separate thin page for every PAA and fan-out variant
What happens: This is exactly the pattern Google names as a scaled content abuse violation when done primarily to manipulate generative responses — a documented policy, not a grey area.
Do this instead: Cluster variants under one page's headings using the stopping rule below, and only split off a dedicated page when the intent genuinely differs, not just the wording.
Scraping PAA with no regard for rate limits or terms
What happens: RFC 9309 gives crawlers real limits — robots.txt parsers must handle files up to 500 KiB, and cached copies shouldn't be used for more than 24 hours — and most PAA-scraping scripts ignore both, which is how an IP gets rate-limited mid-project.
Do this instead: Respect the same 24-hour cache window you'd expect an AI crawler to respect on your own site, and budget for lockouts rather than assuming a scraper runs forever.
Treating any 'ChatGPT prompt volume' figure as real data
What happens: No engine publishes prompt strings or counts to the public. Bing's grounding queries are an explicit sample; Gemini exposes only one call's executed queries; Google's own gen-AI report has no query dimension at all.
Do this instead: Use PAA and your own Search Console queries as your real, sourced list. Treat any vendor's 'prompt volume' number as marketing until they publish their methodology.
Never deduping or clustering the harvested list
What happens: Two or three thousand scraped questions with no clustering step becomes a spreadsheet nobody opens twice.
Do this instead: Group questions by the answer they'd share, not by wording — if two questions would get the same paragraph, they're one entry on the list, not two.
Which questions deserve 40 words, an H2, or a page of their own
40 words, inline
A question that's a restatement of something the page already covers. Answer it in the existing paragraph or a short FAQ entry — no new heading needed.
- Rephrased duplicate of the seed topic
- A yes/no factual variant
- Already answered elsewhere on the page
Its own H2
A question that needs a structurally different explanation but still shares the seed's topic and searcher intent.
- A stable PAA branch across the SERP
- A distinct sub-topic the seed page currently skips
- The same shape repeated by three or more real questions
A page of its own
Different intent, a different searcher, or enough depth that folding it in would bloat the seed page past its own topic.
- Its own commercial or navigational intent
- Needs its own worked example, tool, or dataset
- Would roughly double the page length if folded in
Why ranking pages disagree about 'prompt volume', and what's actually true
Two facts explain the confusion, and neither is complicated once you separate them.
Google frames the whole category plainly: "optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO" — a Search Central changelog entry from 15 May 2026 records a guide specifically mythbusting common AEO/GEO misconceptions. There is no separate discipline with its own volume metric; there's SEO, applied to a search experience that now includes an AI answer.
What actually differs by engine is what's observable. On Gemini, the queries the model executed for a given call are returned directly in the API response. On Bing, publishers get an explicit sample of grounding queries in Webmaster Tools. On Google, the Generative AI performance report has no query dimension whatsoever, and OpenAI documents its rewrite mechanism — including that it routes to Microsoft and Shopify as search partners — without ever showing you the rewritten string. Once you've picked which real questions to target, checking whether you actually show up in them is the next step, not this one. And because conversational prompts often map onto keywords you never targeted in the first place, run the two lists side by side rather than treating them as separate projects.
Six words this category keeps blurring
- PAA (People Also Ask)
- Google's expandable question box on the SERP. Real, visible, and scrapeable — the only layer in this whole chain you can see directly without an API.
- Query fan-out
- Documented expansion of a seed query into several concurrent related queries before retrieval. Google publishes the mechanism and a worked example; it doesn't publish your topic's specific fan-out.
- Rewritten query
- OpenAI's term for what a prompt becomes before it's sent to a search partner. Documented to exist, never shown to the publisher.
- Grounding query
- Bing's term for a query used to retrieve content that was then cited in an answer. Published as an explicit sample in Bing Webmaster Tools, not a full population.
- Prompt volume
- An invented metric with no published source behind it on any major engine. Treat any number attached to this term as an estimate until the vendor states its methodology.
- Scaled content abuse
- Google's named policy against publishing content primarily to cover every query variation in order to manipulate rankings or generative responses. Cited directly in Google's own AI optimization guide.
What to actually do with the list this week
Pull your real PAA questions and your own Search Console queries — that's the sourced list. Run the stopping rule above before you write anything new. Then check whether you already show up for the highest-value questions, see how that compares to your named competitors, and score whether the page answering each one is actually quotable. For a query cluster that keeps returning citation gaps rather than ranking gaps, that's a different diagnosis — and check your titles and descriptions match the question you're actually answering before you conclude the content itself is the problem.
PAA & AI Prompt Miner FAQ
Is there a free way to scrape Google search results?
What are some free alternatives to Answer the Public?
What are common things people ask ChatGPT?
Are there any legal concerns regarding the use of PAA Scrapers?
How do I choose which PAA questions to target?
Does every fan-out query need its own page?
Is 'AI prompt volume' the same as keyword search volume?
Primary sources used on this page
- Google: query fan-out, its worked example, and the scaled-content-abuse warning against per-query pages — developers.google.com
- Google Search Central: changelog entry mythbusting common AEO/GEO misconceptions — developers.google.com
- OpenAI: ChatGPT's query rewriting, named search partners, and memory-adjusted rewrites — help.openai.com
- Google: Gemini API's google_search_call exposing the executed search queries — ai.google.dev
- Microsoft: Bing's AI Performance report and its explicit grounding-query sample — blogs.bing.com
- Google: the Generative AI performance report's dimensions — no query field — support.google.com
- RFC 9309: robots.txt parsing size limit and caching guidance — www.rfc-editor.org
Turn the list into placements, not just rows
Mining the questions is half the job. These six are where the list actually gets used.
Read the guide: Local SEO Keyword Research: A Step-by-Step Guide and Blogging for Small Business: Topics, Frequency and Mistakes. Want it handled for you? See our AI SEO (GEO) services.