Featured snippets are gone. Google's AI writes the answer now.

Vaayam research | Part 6 of a series

For years, SEO playbooks treated the featured snippet as "position zero": win it and Google quotes your page at the top of the results. Our data says that prize has all but disappeared in India. In the last two posts we showed that rank is only part of AI visibility and looked at which domains win Google AI Mode. This post looks at the rest of the answer layer: Featured snippets, AI Overviews and People Also Ask. We analysed 9,734 Google desktop searches in India (English) across 10 industries.

Key findings

• A classic featured snippet appeared on about 2 of 9,734 searches (0.02%).
• People Also Ask appears on 87.5% of searches, with roughly 33,900 questions (about 28,100 unique). 99.4% of those answers are AI-generated. Only about 210 still quote a web page, and Wikipedia supplies about 10 of them.
• The AI share of People Also Ask answers is between 99.1% and 100% in every industry.
• Counting AI Overviews and AI-written People Also Ask answers together, 95.7% of searches show at least one AI-written answer.
• 12.8% of searches get their AI answer only through People Also Ask, with no AI Overview. The gap is widest in Legal and Home services.
• The AI Overview is the first block on 60.2% of page 1s. An organic result comes first on 22.8%.

1. Featured snippets are almost extinct in India

A classic featured snippet appeared on about 2 of the 9,734 searches in our sample, or 0.02%. Meanwhile 95.7% of searches showed at least one AI-written answer. If your content strategy still depends on winning featured snippets, you are optimising for a result that has nearly disappeared. The on-page answer is now written by Google's AI, not quoted from a site.

2. 99.4% of People Also Ask answers are written by Google's AI

People Also Ask is on 87.5% of searches, roughly 8,500 of the 9,734, and carries around 33,900 questions (about 28,100 unique). 99.4% of those answers are written by Google's AI. Only about 210 answers still quote a web page, and Wikipedia supplies about 10 of them. People Also Ask used to be a place where a well-structured page could be quoted. In this dataset it is almost entirely AI-generated.

3. AI-written answers are everywhere, in every industry

The AI share of People Also Ask answers sits between 99.1% and 100% in every industry we measured, so this is not a sector quirk. Counting AI-written People Also Ask answers alongside AI Overviews, 99% of SaaS and Healthcare searches show at least one AI-written answer, and even the lowest industry, Home services, reaches 85%. The chart shows how much People Also Ask adds on top of AI Overviews.

4. People Also Ask carries AI answers where AI Overviews don't

12.8% of searches get their AI-written answer only through People Also Ask, with no AI Overview. The gap is widest in Legal, where 75.8% of searches have an AI Overview but 97.8% have some AI-written answer, and in Home services, at 57.0% against 85.0%. If you only track AI Overview presence, you will understate how much of your category is already answered by AI.

5. The AI Overview is the first thing most searchers see

The AI Overview is the first block on 60.2% of page 1s. An organic result comes first on only 22.8%. For most searches in India, the top of the page is an AI-written answer, not a link, which is why click-through and visibility reports built on rank alone now miss most of what searchers read first.

What to do with this data

Stop treating featured snippets as a primary target in India. Track AI Overview and People Also Ask presence for each priority keyword, because People Also Ask can carry an AI answer even when no AI Overview appears. Write pages so that the key fact, definition or steps are clear and self-contained, which makes them easier for AI systems to use and cite.

Check the questions in People Also Ask for your category and ask whether your brand appears in the answers or the cited sources. In Legal and Home services, where AI Overviews are less common, People Also Ask is the main place AI answers appear, so monitor it separately.

Report on answer-layer visibility, not just rank and traffic. With an AI-written answer on 95.7% of searches and first on 60.2% of page 1s, a flat click trend may reflect the answer layer rather than your content. These findings come from a one-day correlation snapshot, so validate them against your own category before shifting budget.

Read the rest of the series

Part 4: Do Google rankings predict AI visibility? — how organic rank relates to AI Mode citations.

Part 5: The domains winning Google AI Mode in India — the 20 most-cited domains and who gains and loses.

Method and limits

The dataset covers 9,734 keywords across 10 industries, each with a Google organic result set and answer-layer features captured on one day, 26 September 2026, for India in English on desktop. The capture is a non-personalised snapshot, so individual users may see different results. Every finding is a correlation and none show causation.