What PAA Boxes Are Actually Worth
Every Google search for a home care topic generates People Also Ask boxes — expandable questions that appear below the first result and above organic listings. They expand when clicked. They cascade — clicking one generates three or four more beneath it.
For an agency, a PAA box does two things. It drives a click if the family wants more detail. It creates a brand impression even if they do not. A family researching home care options may encounter a specific agency's name in a PAA box before they ever search for that agency directly. That impression matters when they are ready to call.
The question is who occupies those boxes. In home care, the answer is almost never an agency.
Who Is Winning
Directories own 61% of PAA boxes for home care keywords. Care.com, A Place for Mom, and Caring.com appear across nearly every keyword cluster. Government and nonprofit sites — Medicare.gov, AARP, NAHC — hold another 18%.
Agencies own less than 4%.
The domain that owns 209 boxes in our dataset is not a home care agency. It is a content site with hundreds of pages structured specifically to answer home care questions. Its content is not better than what a knowledgeable agency owner could write. It is structured differently — short, specific answers to specific questions, with FAQ schema markup that tells Google explicitly: this is a question, this is the answer.
Why the Gap Is Structural
Directories rank in PAA boxes for the same reason they rank in organic results. They have hundreds of pages targeting home care questions, strong domain authority, and content structured for featured snippets and AI extraction.
What directories do not have is local specificity. A Care.com article answering "how much does home care cost?" cannot mention your market's rate range, your agency's approach to care planning, or what happens when a family calls you at 8 PM.
That specificity is the gap an agency can fill. The PAA algorithm rewards specific, direct, complete answers — not marketing language. An agency FAQ page that says "In most markets, non-medical home care costs between $22 and $35 per hour, depending on the level of care, whether care is provided during standard hours or nights and weekends, and the agency's model" will outperform a page that says "Contact us for a personalized quote."
The Questions That Matter Most
The most frequently appearing questions across 54 home care keywords:
- What is the difference between home care and home health care?
- How much does home care cost per hour?
- Does Medicare cover home care?
- What does a home care agency do?
- How do I find a good home care agency?
- What is included in personal care services?
- How do I know if my parent needs home care?
- What is the difference between a caregiver and a home health aide?
- Can family members be paid as caregivers?
- How do I pay for home care?
"What is the difference between home care and home health care?" appears in PAA boxes for 38 of the 54 keywords analyzed. One well-written answer to that question, marked up with FAQ schema, has a credible path to appearing across 38 different searches.
The Schema Gap
Fewer than 12% of agency websites in our sample have any FAQ schema markup. Of those, fewer than half have it implemented correctly enough to be eligible for PAA consideration.
FAQ schema is a JSON-LD block that tells Google explicitly: here is a question, here is the answer. It does not guarantee PAA placement — the content still needs to be good enough to win the box. But it is the clearest signal available to a non-directory site, and most agencies are not sending it.
The implementation is not technically complex. A FAQPage schema block with five or ten questions added to a service page makes that content eligible. The harder part is writing answers that are direct, specific, and complete enough to win over the directory content currently occupying those boxes.
What the Compounding Looks Like
An agency that wins PAA boxes for five of the ten questions above has meaningful organic presence across the full keyword cluster — not just on the pages where those questions appear, but on the related searches that PAA cascades generate.
The domain with 209 boxes did not build that presence by accident. Someone identified the questions that appeared most often across home care searches and wrote specific answers to each one. The content strategy is visible in the outcome.
An agency that applies the same logic to its FAQ page and service page content can compete for a portion of that visibility. The directories cannot be displaced. But the 4% of boxes currently owned by agencies can grow — and the conditions required to win those boxes are accessible to any agency that commits to writing answers that are specific enough to actually answer the question.
Source: HCB PAA Ownership Study — 1,500 PAA queries, 54 keywords, depth 100, 2026. For a full breakdown of content strategy for home care marketing, see Home Care Marketing Strategies or our Home Care Marketing service.