If you’ve never used Google’s “People Also Ask” feature with intent, you may not know that it is the most honest mirror of public anxiety I have ever scrolled through.
I started this exercise meaning to do keyword research. I wanted to know what someone newly aware of BRCA mutations is actually typing into the search bar — not what the medical literature thinks they should be asking, but what they actually ask. Twelve seed queries, each surfacing about eight suggested follow-ups. By the end of an afternoon I had ninety-six questions written down on a single page, and the page felt heavier than I had expected.
What I started with
The seed queries were straightforward. What is BRCA. BRCA test cost. BRCA test how. BRCA positive what now. The kind of queries someone would type after a family member’s diagnosis or after a TikTok pushed something about hereditary breast cancer onto their feed.
I pulled the People Also Ask box for each seed and copied every suggestion. No filtering, no editorializing.
What came back
Three patterns that I did not see coming.
Cost dominates everything. Roughly a quarter of all surfaced questions were about price, insurance, whether 23andMe counts, whether the test is covered by Medicaid in different states. This isn’t anxiety about the result. It’s a barrier-to-entry signal. People who don’t know whether they can afford a test ask different questions than people who know they can. The latter group is asking about timing and accuracy. The former group is asking whether the question is even available to them.
The fears are very specific. Not “will I get cancer.” Closer to “what does a positive result mean for my children,” “can I have a baby,” “will insurance drop me,” “is this confidential at work.” The lay anxieties are about consequences in a person’s life, not about abstract probability.
Adoption and unknown family history barely appear. This was the one I noticed last and have been thinking about most. The standard family-history triage that most clinical sites lead with — did anyone in your immediate family have breast or ovarian cancer before 50? — assumes you know your immediate family’s medical history. A meaningful slice of people do not. Adoptees, donor-conceived adults, people estranged from their biological families. They are searching, but not in family-history language. They are searching for “BRCA test without family history,” which is a different conceptual question and almost no clinical site indexes for it well.
That last pattern is the next post.
What I’m doing with this
The point of this exercise wasn’t keyword research as marketing. It was understanding what kind of resource is missing. A resource written from the standard family-history triage assumes a population that is over-represented online and in clinical communication. Writing for the population that isn’t assumed by that triage is a different content architecture, not just different SEO.
The next post will look at the keyword cluster I found around adoptees and people without known family history, and what their search behavior reveals about where the standard guidance breaks.