We ran 1,500 PAA queries across 54 home care keywords at depth 100. Directories dominate. Agencies are nearly absent. The content ranking in these boxes was not written for families — it was written to rank, and it worked.
Key Findings
- Directories own 61% of PAA boxes — Care.com, A Place for Mom, Caring.com, and similar aggregators appear across nearly every keyword cluster
- Agencies own less than 4% of PAA boxes despite being the answer families actually need
- The top 10 PAA questions by frequency appear across dozens of related keywords — owning the answer to one question compounds across many searches
- "What is the difference between home care and home health care?" appears in PAA boxes for 38 of 54 keywords analyzed — the most common question in the dataset
- FAQ schema is underused: fewer than 12% of agency websites in our sample have any FAQ schema markup
- Government and nonprofit sites (Medicare.gov, AARP, NAHC) hold 18% of PAA boxes — not displacing them is an unrealistic goal; appearing alongside them is not
The PAA Box as a Traffic Channel
People Also Ask boxes appear in the majority of home care searches. They expand when clicked, showing the full answer without requiring the user to leave Google. They also cascade — clicking one PAA box typically generates three or four new questions beneath it.
For an agency website, ranking in a PAA box provides two things: a click if the family wants more, and brand presence if they don't. The brand presence matters. Families conducting research on home care options may see an agency's name in a PAA box before they ever visit the agency's website. That impression matters for recall when they're ready to call.
What's Ranking and Why
Directories rank in PAA boxes for the same reason they rank in organic results: they have hundreds or thousands of pages targeting home care questions, with strong domain authority and structured content designed for featured snippets.
What directories do not have is local specificity. A Care.com article answering "how much does home care cost?" cannot mention your market's specific rate range, your agency's specific services, or your caregivers. That specificity is the gap an agency can fill — and the PAA algorithm rewards specific, complete answers.
Government and nonprofit content ranks because it is authoritative, neutral, and comprehensive. Families trust Medicare.gov. That trust transfers to the content in the box.
The 4% of boxes owned by agencies belong almost entirely to agencies with FAQ schema implemented, dedicated FAQ pages, or blog content specifically written to answer the question in the box. The pattern is consistent: structured answers win.
The Top PAA Questions
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?
An agency that writes a complete, specific answer to each of these questions — with FAQ schema, in a format Google can extract — has a credible path to appearing in PAA boxes for dozens of related searches.
FAQ Schema Adoption
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 tells Google explicitly: here is a question, here is the answer. It does not guarantee PAA placement, but it is the clearest signal available to a non-directory site. Agencies not using it are competing with one hand behind their back.
The implementation is not complex. A FAQPage JSON-LD block with two to five questions added to a service page or a dedicated FAQ page is sufficient to make the content eligible. The harder part is writing answers that are complete enough to win the box.
The Compounding Effect
PAA boxes do not operate independently. The 38-keyword overlap for "what is the difference between home care and home health care?" means a single piece of content that wins that box appears across 38 different searches. The same compounding dynamic applies to the other top questions.
An agency that wins PAA boxes for five questions in the top-10 list has meaningful organic visibility across the full keyword cluster — not just on the pages where those questions appear directly, but on the related searches that PAA cascades generate.
Methodology
We ran 1,500 PAA queries across 54 home care keywords at depth 100 using the DataForSEO PAA API. Keywords were drawn from an Ahrefs export of US home care search terms with at least 100 monthly searches. PAA ownership was assigned to the domain appearing in the answer box. Queries were run in 2026 from US IP addresses.
If your agency has service pages and no FAQ schema, you're not eligible for the PAA boxes your competitors are winning. Our SEO service for home care agencies includes implementing FAQPage schema and writing the answers that win boxes — specific, direct, and complete enough for Google to extract.