Sad news this week that Answer the Public was acquired by NP Digital, i.e. Ubersuggest, i.e. Neil Patel.
Answer the Public is a keyword tool that visualizes search questions and suggested autocomplete searches. Categories consist of the 5 Ws, plus ‘how’, ‘can’, ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘which’ and ‘will’. It would also include searches with prepositions, comparisons, and an alphabetical list of keywords. You could view these in a search cloud view…
…or as a standard list.
I was not an avid user of Answer the Public, but it was a great tool when I needed it. It was one of my favorite tools for generating topic ideas for content.
Being that most things Neil touches turn to garbage… I’m looking at you Ubersuggest, people have been left looking for an alternative to Answer the Public for the inevitable day when Neil puts his stamp on it.
There is a really simple alternative that a lot of people already have access to and do not realize it. Semrush has a similar capability in its Keyword Overview tool…
…and its Keyword Magic Tool.
In both cases, it is under an option simply labeled Questions.
It’s not quite the same. There is no search cloud option, but to be honest, the search cloud image was kind of just gimmicky anyhow. It was not actually all that practical to use. The list view was easier to make use of.
However, Semrush more than makes up for the lack of a search cloud view by providing you with actual actionable data. You can see search volumes, trends, a keyword difficulty score, and information about SERP features all in one place. To me this makes it a better option than Answer the Public ever was.
The one thing missing that I really like in Answer the Public is how it separates the questions by who, what, why, when, etc. Semrush does not have that feature, but you could certainly filter by ‘who’. Then when you are done with those filter by ‘what’, and so on.
Although I do not use it, I should also mention that Ahrefs also has a similar function on their Keyword Generator tool. You can even use it for free at: https://ahrefs.com/keyword-generator.
For the video version click below:
