What AlsoAsked actually does

Type "keyword research" into Google and a box of four questions appears under the first results. Click one and Google adds two or three more. AlsoAsked automates that clicking. It reads Google's live People Also Ask (PAA) boxes, follows each question to the ones it spawns, and draws the result as a branching tree you can take in at a glance. The vendor calls it "the only tool that provides live People Also Ask data". According to founder Mark Williams-Cook, it gets that data by simulating clicks on the questions, not by looking them up in a stored keyword database.

That is the whole product. A standard search costs one credit, goes two levels deep and returns about 25 questions on average. A deep search goes three levels and costs four credits. The help center puts its average at about 100 questions while the homepage says 150, so treat the higher figure as a best case.

Every search is pinned to a city. Pick a country and AlsoAsked selects its most populous city for you, and there is no way to search without one. City targeting works in every language Google supports. That helps a local business, because the questions shown in one city are not always the ones shown nationally.

AlsoAsked is built by Candour, a UK search agency, and has been running since November 2019. The paid version replaced a free beta in January 2021. Its homepage counter read 115,262 registered users and just over 10.2 million searches when we checked in October 2026.

Pricing and the credit math

Three paid plans, checked on alsoasked.com/pricing on October 15, 2026. All prices exclude tax.

Every plan includes unlimited users, all regions and languages, and PNG export of the question map. Deep search and CSV data export start at Lite. Bulk search, API access, the MCP server and pay-as-you-go credits are Pro only. There is an Enterprise tier with custom pricing, and the help center says plainly that no discount coupons are running.

The number that matters is cost per question. On Lite, 300 credits buy 300 standard searches or 75 deep ones a month. Monthly credits do not roll over, so a quiet month is money lost. Pro's pay-as-you-go credits are the exception: they never expire, start at $0.06 each and fall by up to 50% at 100,000 credits. Cancel, though, and they are gone without a refund. Monthly plans can be cancelled at any time, and you keep your credits until the billing period ends.

You can try it before paying. A few searches a day work without an account. A registered free account gets 3 searches that, per the help center, do not reset, so signing up buys you nothing over staying logged out.

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The limits the pricing page skips

The cache window doubles as a freshness ceiling. Re-run a search you already ran and AlsoAsked serves it from cache, instantly and for free. On Basic the cache lasts 24 hours, so that is a pure saving. On Pro it holds results for up to a year, which means a tree you open in October may show what Google displayed last winter unless you spend a credit to refresh it. PAA boxes change often. Check the date before you brief a writer from a cached map.

Exports are where Basic falls short. The pricing page lists CSV data export from Lite upwards, and the export help article says free and Basic accounts get the question text only. Lite and Pro get the full row: the answer snippet, the source URL and page title, the tier 1 and tier 2 positions, region, language and, since a May 27, 2026 update, an "is AI overview" flag that marks whether the source was a Google AI Overview rather than a web result. If you want PAA answers in a spreadsheet to see which competitors own them, Basic cannot do it.

Bulk search on Pro takes a CSV of up to 1,000 queries and returns a zip file anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours later. You need enough credits up front to cover every term. Searches that return nothing are refunded.

The AI search pivot

The homepage now leads with "Map intent for AI and traditional search", and two 2026 changes back it up. The AI Overview flag in exports shows which PAA answers Google now sources from an AI Overview - a hint that the question may have stopped sending clicks to a normal page. And since July 2026, Pro accounts can connect AlsoAsked to an AI assistant over MCP by adding the server URL https://alsoasked.com/mcp, with no API key needed. An assistant can then pull a live question tree into a content brief without anyone exporting a file.

Developers get a sync and async REST API with webhook support, an official PHP client and a sandbox. It spends the same credits as the web app and it is Pro only, so there is no cheap way to script AlsoAsked.

Where it falls short

AlsoAsked shows questions and nothing else. There is no search volume, no keyword difficulty and no click data, and Google is the only engine covered. A tree can tell you that people ask whether keyword research still matters. It cannot tell you whether ten or ten thousand of them ask it each month. You still need Semrush, Ahrefs or Keywords Everywhere to size the opportunity.

The tree itself can mislead. The most detailed independent critique we found, from Stuff With Words, calls the visuals "genuinely impressive" but warns that "parent-child question relationships often don't make logical sense in practice" and that the connections make topics look more related than they are. A child question appears because Google showed it after a click, not because it belongs in the same article. The same reviewer lost count of the times they zoomed the map by accident while trying to scroll - minor on a 25-question tree, tiring on a 100-question deep search.

We found no body of G2, Trustpilot or Reddit reviews large enough to quote, so read that critique as one experienced user's view rather than a consensus.

AlsoAsked vs the alternatives

AnswerThePublic is the closest rival. It maps autocomplete suggestions as well as questions and starts at about $11/month billed annually, according to third-party price trackers. It casts the wider net. AlsoAsked goes deeper into one source and shows how the questions connect.

The full SEO suites cost several times more. Semrush starts at $139/month and Ahrefs' main plans at $129/month, both checked in October 2026, and each attaches search volume to its question reports. If you already pay for one, what AlsoAsked adds is the live tree and the city targeting, not the questions themselves. If you pay for neither, Keywords Everywhere puts volume next to your searches, and AlsoAsked's Screaming Frog integration pairs its questions with a site crawl.

Verdict

Buy Lite at $29/month if you write or commission content and want to know which follow-up questions a page has to answer. 300 credits cover a working month for one site, deep search is included, and the full CSV with the AI Overview flag is the most useful thing the product exports. Pro at $59/month earns its price only for agencies running bulk jobs or teams feeding PAA data to an AI assistant over MCP.

Skip Basic. Without deep search or full exports, it is $15 a month to look at trees you can mostly see in the free logged-out searches. Skip AlsoAsked altogether if you need to know how many people search for something: Semrush or Ahrefs answer that, and their question reports are good enough for occasional use. And if you want breadth over depth, AnswerThePublic covers more query types for about the same entry price.