Question-shaped heading
A question-shaped heading is a subheading written in the exact form a person would ask the question — 'How much does an incentive audit cost?' rather than 'Pricing'. It raises the semantic match between a retrieved chunk and a user query, which is the mechanism that decides whether a passage is surfaced as an answer.
Why phrasing changes retrieval
Retrieval is a similarity comparison between the user's question and your text. A heading that already is the question shortens that distance, and the paragraph beneath it inherits the match. A one-word label like 'Pricing' carries almost no semantic surface for the comparison to catch.
When not to use them
Narrative essays and manifestos lose their voice if every subhead becomes an FAQ. Reserve question-shaped headings for reference, definition, comparison, and pricing pages — the formats people arrive at with a literal question already formed.
Turning labels into questions
The rewrite is mechanical. 'Pricing' becomes 'How much does it cost?'. 'Methodology' becomes 'How does the audit work?'. 'Eligibility' becomes 'Who is the Academy for?'. Each rewrite adds the interrogative surface a retrieval comparison can match, and each one forces the paragraph beneath it to actually answer rather than describe.
- —Use the phrasing your buyers use, including their imprecise words.
- —Keep headings under about 10 words so they survive as snippet titles.
- —One question per heading; compound questions dilute the match.
- —Answer inside the first two sentences under the heading.
- —Mirror the top heading question in the page title and meta description.
Headings and FAQ schema are not the same lever
FAQPage markup describes a set of question-answer pairs to a parser. Question-shaped headings shape the retrievable prose itself. Markup without matching visible content is a mismatch engines increasingly discount, so write the headings first and let the schema describe what is genuinely on the page.
Frequently asked
- Should every heading be a question?
- No. Use them where the reader arrives with a literal question. On narrative pages, a declarative heading that states the claim works just as well for extraction.
Related definitions
Answer Block
An answer block is a short, self-contained passage — typically 40 to 70 words — placed near the top of a page that answers the page's core question in full, without pronouns or context borrowed from surrounding text. It is the unit answer engines extract and quote.
Answer Engine Optimization
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so answer engines — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot — can extract, cite, and reuse it as the answer to a question. Where SEO competes for a click on a ranked link, AEO competes to be the sentence the machine says out loud.