When someone searches on ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, they do not type a keyword. They ask a question, and the assistant turns it into longer, more specific web searches, looking for a page that answers exactly that. So your content plan should be a list of questions: use keywords to decide which pages to write, and real questions to decide what each page says, in what order.
Below: the data on how people actually search AI assistants, why questions alone are not enough for Google, the best tools for finding questions (free and paid, compared), and a five-step way to turn them into a plan.
Key takeaways
- 65% to 85% of ChatGPT prompts in Semrush's clickstream data matched no keyword at all in its 27-billion-keyword database.
- The searches ChatGPT runs behind the scenes doubled from about 6 to about 12 words between October 2025 and January 2026, in Peec AI's analysis of 20 million of them.
- Keywords still decide which pages to write. Questions decide the H2s, the FAQ and the first sentence under each heading.
- Questions pay a tax in Google. At the same top-3 position, question queries earned 58% fewer clicks in Outrank's study of 1.2 million queries, so group questions into strong pages instead of one thin page per question.
- Finding questions is cheap. People Also Ask Finder is free and unlimited, AnswerThePublic and Answer Socrates give 3 free searches a day, and AlsoAsked starts at $12 a month billed yearly.
Nobody types two words into ChatGPT
Check it yourself. Open ChatGPT and scroll your own history. Count how many of your last ten prompts were two or three words. Almost none. They are full questions, and half of them are questions somebody's blog post should have answered.
That is your audience doing the same thing about your category, and the data agrees:
- Semrush's clickstream study found that, for most of the period from October 2024 to February 2026, 65% to 85% of ChatGPT prompts could not be matched to any keyword in its database. Prompts that triggered a web search averaged 8.7 words in early 2026, up from 4.7 a year earlier.
- Those prompts are not what hits the web. OpenAI says ChatGPT rewrites each one into one or more targeted searches, and Peec AI found those searches doubled to about 12 words in four months.
- Google works the same way in AI Mode, which uses "query fan-out" to break a question into subtopics and run many searches at once.
You can even see it in your own Search Console. This very post gets impressions for queries like:
it seems like you haven't provided a keyword search. please share a keyword, and i'll be happy to help you transform it into a natural-language question!
That is an AI tool's reply, fired at Google as a search after someone gave it an empty keyword to turn into a question. In Outrank's query fan-out study, 79% of 111 sites were already receiving machine-written queries like this.
Keywords pick the page, questions build it
None of this makes keywords useless. Google stopped matching pages purely on keyword strings back in 2012, when it introduced the Knowledge Graph with the line "things, not strings": search engines understand entities and topics, not just exact phrases. AI assistants push that further. But a keyword with real search volume is still the best signal that a topic deserves its own page.
So split the jobs:
- Keywords decide the pages. One page per topic people search for, grouped so pages do not compete (see keyword clustering).
- Questions decide what goes on the page. Each real question becomes an H2 or an FAQ entry, answered in the first one or two sentences below it.
A question keyword is simply a search phrased as a question, starting with words like how, what, why, can or does. They are the raw material for those H2s.
There is a reason not to give every question its own page. In Google, questions pay a tax. In the same fan-out study, question queries earned 58% fewer clicks than other queries at the same top-3 position, and long machine-written questions almost never got a click. Outrank's study of 6.2 million pages found standalone question articles earned 0.79× the click-through rate of the same site's other articles at positions 4 to 10. Questions win citations in AI answers; strong topic pages still win the clicks. Across the 96 questions in our AI citation benchmark, blog content made up 64% to 80% of the sources ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude cited, for each of the six question types we tested. Build pages that do both.
Where to find the questions people ask
No tool shows you real ChatGPT prompts, because AI platforms do not publish that data. These sources are the closest proxies: Google's own question boxes, autocomplete, Reddit and your own Search Console.
Question research tools compared (October 2026)
| People Also Ask Finder | $0/mo | ✓ | Google autocomplete with 14 question prefixes, live Reddit threads, AI clustering by intent | Free question trees with the Reddit threads behind them |
| Google Search Console | $0/mo | ✓ | Your own site's search queries | Questions you already get impressions for |
| Reddit search | $0/mo | ✓ | Real threads from real users | The exact words your buyers use |
| AnswerThePublic | $10/mo | ✓ | Search autocomplete suggestions, plus AI prompt suggestions on paid plans | Visual question maps; 3 free searches a day |
| AlsoAsked | $12/mo | ✓ | Live Google People Also Ask boxes, a few levels deep | Seeing how questions connect for one page outline |
| Answer Socrates | $15.83/mo | ✓ | Google questions, autocomplete long-tails and topic clusters | Planning many pages; 3 free searches a day |
Click a column header to sort.
We built People Also Ask Finder for this exact job: drop in a topic and it pulls the autocomplete questions and the Reddit threads behind them, then clusters both by intent. It is free, with no signup.
AlsoAsked vs Answer Socrates
They answer different needs. AlsoAsked shows Google's live People Also Ask boxes as a tree, so you see which questions lead to which. That makes it best for outlining a single page, and it runs on credits (from $12 a month for 100, billed yearly). Answer Socrates casts a wider net, turning one seed into hundreds of question and long-tail ideas with clustering, which suits planning a whole topic. It gives 3 free searches a day and starts at $15.83 a month billed yearly ($19 monthly). If you only need the questions, the free tools above cover most of it.
Turn questions into a content plan in five steps
- 1
Pick the topics with keywords
Start from keywords your site can realistically rank for, usually long-tail terms with low difficulty, and group them into one topic per page. Our guide to long-tail keyword research covers how. - 2
Pull the questions for each topic
Run each topic through a question tool, then check Reddit and your own Search Console. In Search Console, go to Performance → Search results → Add filter → Query → Custom (regex) and use^(how|what|why|when|where|which|who|can|does|do|is|are|should)\sto list question queries. - 3
Group them by intent
Questions that need the same answer belong on the same page. Questions that need a different page (a comparison, a pricing page, a tutorial) start a new one. - 4
Make each question an H2 and answer it first
Put the answer in the first one or two sentences under the heading, then the detail. Collect the short ones in an FAQ at the end. This is the shape both featured snippets and AI answers quote. - 5
Recheck every month
New question queries show up in Search Console as AI tools search around your pages. Add the real ones to the page and ignore the machine-written noise.
Getting the structure right is half of it. The other half is being findable when the assistant searches, which why ChatGPT skips your site covers, and being on the pages it already trusts, covered in how to get ChatGPT to recommend your product. To see which pages those are for a question in your category, run it through our free AI citation checker, which labels every source ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude cite.
Or skip the manual part. Outrank finds the keywords your site can win, writes a structured article with an FAQ for each one, publishes it to your CMS every day, and pairs the pages with backlinks so they can actually rank.
FAQ
What is a question keyword?
A question keyword is a search query phrased as a question, usually starting with how, what, why, can, does or is. Question keywords show what people want to know about a topic, which makes them the best source for H2s and FAQ entries. In AI search, nearly every prompt is phrased this way.
What does "things, not strings" mean in SEO?
It is the line Google used in 2012 to introduce its Knowledge Graph: search should understand real-world entities and how they relate, not just match strings of text. For SEO it means covering a topic and its related entities clearly matters more than repeating an exact keyword. AI assistants take the same approach even further.
AlsoAsked vs Answer Socrates: which is better?
AlsoAsked is better for outlining one page, because it maps how Google's People Also Ask questions branch from each other; it starts at $12 a month billed yearly. Answer Socrates is better for planning many pages, with broader question and long-tail ideas, clustering and 3 free searches a day; paid plans start at $15.83 a month billed yearly.
Should every question get its own page?
No. Group questions that share an answer onto one page, with each question as an H2 or FAQ entry. Question queries earn fewer clicks in Google than other queries at the same position, so a strong page that answers ten related questions usually beats ten thin pages that answer one each.
How do I find the questions people ask ChatGPT?
You cannot see real ChatGPT prompts, because OpenAI does not share them. The closest proxies are Google's People Also Ask boxes and autocomplete, Reddit threads, long question queries in your Search Console, and the grounding queries in Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report.
