Get a page ancestor from a most viewed list

Question

I'm using WPBeginner's tutorial do display a list of the most viewed pages on a site.

This is on my functions.php:

function wpb_set_post_views($postID) {
    $count_key = 'wpb_post_views_count';
    $count = get_post_meta($postID, $count_key, true);
    if($count==''){
        $count = 0;
        delete_post_meta($postID, $count_key);
        add_post_meta($postID, $count_key, '0');
    }else{
        $count++;
        update_post_meta($postID, $count_key, $count);
    }
}
//To keep the count accurate, lets get rid of prefetching
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link_wp_head', 10, 0);

this is on my page.php (inside the loop):

<?php wpb_set_post_views(get_the_ID()); ?>

and this is in a custom template page, where I'll display the top hits list (instead of the regular the_content):

<?php echo '<ul>';
    $popularpost = new WP_Query( array( 'post_type' => 'page', 'posts_per_page' => 20, 'meta_key' => 'wpb_post_views_count', 'orderby' => 'meta_value_num', 'order' => 'DESC', 'exclude' => '19,21,22', 'date_query' => array('before' => '1 month ago') ) );
    while ( $popularpost->have_posts() ) : $popularpost->the_post();
?>
    <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endwhile;
echo '</ul>'; ?>

It works just fine, but I'd like to have the page ancestor before the page link on the list. I tried adding these inside <li>, right before the link for the page - but they didn't return anything:

<?php get_ancestors(); ?> 

&

<?php $ancestors = get_ancestors( '$post->ID', 'page', 'post_type' ); ?>

How can I display the ancestor of a page there?

Answer 1

get_ancestors will return array form value. So if you talking about how to get and display that ancestors with link:

<?php 
 $arrAncestors = get_ancestors( $post->ID, 'page'); 
 $cntAncestors = COUNT($arrAncestors);
 if($cntAncestors > 0) {
   $parentPostId = $arrAncestors[$cntAncestors - 1];
   $parentPageLink = get_permalink($parentPostId);
   $parentTitle = get_the_title($parentPostId);
   print '<li><a href="<?php $parentPageLink ?>" title="<?php $parentTitle; ?>"><?php $parentTitle; ?></a></li>';
 }
?>

Hope you get solution from above snippet.