A free AlsoAsked alternative

Most “free alternative” pages are a feature table with every tick in one column. That is not useful to anyone choosing a tool, so here is the honest version, including the parts where the paid tool wins.

What does AlsoAsked actually do?

It queries Google, reads the People Also Ask box for your keyword, then expands those questions to collect the ones that appear underneath, and repeats to the depth you choose. The output is a branching tree of the questions Google really showed, for the region and language you picked, which you can export or share.

That is a genuinely different thing from guessing what the box might contain. If you need to point at a screen and say “Google shows this question for this query in this country”, that is what you are paying for.

What does this tool do differently?

It reconstructs the same kind of question set from sources that are free to query. Your keyword is fanned out through Google autocomplete with fourteen question prefixes, which surfaces the phrasings people type into the search box. In parallel it searches Reddit for live threads on the topic and keeps the ones that are themselves questions. An AI pass then groups everything by intent, the way the PAA box groups by sub-topic, and refines the related search terms.

• Unlimited searches. No credits, no daily cap, no account.
• Real Reddit threads. Every search lists live discussions, and questions sourced from Reddit link to the thread they came from. This is the part the paid tools do not do, and it is often where the sharpest angles are.
• Related searches. The “people also search for” style terms sit beside the question tree, deduplicated.
• CSV export of every question, term and thread in one file.

What does AlsoAsked do that this tool does not?

Several things, and they are the reasons its customers pay:

• It reads the live PAA box. This tool infers an equivalent question set from autocomplete and Reddit. Close in practice, not the same evidence.
• Deeper, explicitly controlled branching, so you can say how many levels of expansion you want.
• Saved and repeatable searches, bulk runs, and an API for people wiring this into a pipeline.
• Finer region and language targeting than the ten markets offered here.

Features and plans on any paid tool change. Check alsoasked.com before you decide on the strength of anything written here.

How much does AlsoAsked cost?

As of August 2026, paid plans start at from $12/mo and there is a small free allowance to try it. AnswerThePublic, the other tool people compare against, starts at from $20/mo and limits free searches in a similar way. Both are reasonable prices for what they do. Neither is free in the sense that matters when you want to run forty searches while scoping a content plan.

Competitor plans taken from their public pricing pages, last checked 17 August 2026.

Is a free People Also Ask tool good enough?

For research, usually yes. When you are deciding what to write, the question you need is “what does this audience not know”, and autocomplete plus Reddit answers that well. You are going to rewrite the phrasing for your own headings anyway, so exact PAA wording matters less than people assume.

For reporting, no. If a client or a manager needs proof of what Google displayed, on a date, in a market, buy the tool that captures it. Inference is not evidence, and pretending otherwise is how people get caught out in review meetings.

Which one should you use?

Start here, because it costs nothing and takes one search to find out whether the question set is rich enough for your topic. If you hit a wall, the wall will be one of three things: you need the literal PAA box, you need it in bulk or through an API, or you need a market that is not in the ten offered. Any of those, and AlsoAsked is the right purchase rather than a grudging one.

If you are not sure what to do with the questions once you have them, that is the next guide.