Google has been testing selectors and search refinement bubbles in the “People Also Ask” (PAA) area of the search results. As a user searches something, the PAA box comes up and then the user is able to refine those questions by selecting a refinement bubble to narrow their options.

Twitter user, Brodie Clark, noticed this change and posted a gif of it in action. 

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“Categorising of People Also Ask data? Music to my ears. When the buttons appear alongside the PAA box, they allow you to filter the questions by topic focus. This has the potential to be an awesome dataset for SEOs when creating content.”

– Brodie Clark 

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Is it really new?

Well, no it’s not. Google has implemented refinement bubble video options in some featured snippets, as seen below. However, the refinement bubbles in PAA are new, and implementing this could be a real gold mine for SEO research. 

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Why should you care?

Creating content which is strong enough to feature in PAA is a big deal. However, Google testing refinement bubbles in PAA allows websites to create and tailor their content to match specific, or even several, refinement bubbles. Furthermore, this allows websites to rank in PAA easier than before. It will still be difficult to rank in PAA, but with the refinement bubbles, it gives a website more opportunity of ranking in the PAA’s.

Google has been busy implementing new features and changing algorithms. Read about the new features here and why the tech giant was pressured into changing its algorithm here.