Question-Shaped Heading
A question-shaped heading is a heading written as the actual question a user would ask, which aligns your content with real queries and marks exactly where the answer begins.
A question-shaped heading phrases the heading as the real question. Instead of a terse label like "Pricing," it reads "How much does it cost?" — mirroring how people actually ask AI, and signaling unmistakably that the answer to that question follows directly beneath.
It does double duty across two pillars. For alignment, matching your headings to genuine queries (mine them from People Also Ask) ties your content to what's really being asked. For extractability, a question heading immediately followed by a crisp, answer-first passage — the inverted pyramid — gives an engine a clean question-and-answer pair to lift, and pairs naturally with FAQPage schema. It's one of the simplest high-leverage AEO habits.
Example. Changing a heading from "Shipping" to "How long does shipping take?" with the answer in the very next sentence turns a vague section into a ready-made answer an engine can quote verbatim.
Relevant pillars
Related terms
- People Also AskPeople Also Ask is a Google feature showing related follow-up questions users search, and it is a free, direct window into the real questions your content should answer.
- FAQPage SchemaFAQPage schema is structured data that marks a list of questions and answers on a page, making your Q&A content explicit and machine-readable for search and AI systems.
- Inverted PyramidThe inverted pyramid is a writing structure, borrowed from journalism, that puts the most important information first and supporting detail after, making each passage answer-first and easy for AI to lift.