SERP Features

SERP features are elements in Google’s search results that go beyond the standard list of organic links. They include direct answers, visual blocks, maps, product listings, video carousels, and AI-generated summaries. A results page that is ten organic links and nothing else is now the exception: across a million randomly selected US desktop results in June 2025, Ahrefs found sitelinks on 84.95% and question blocks on 79.13%.¹

For keyword research, features change what a query is actually worth to you. The research assigns demand to pages, and the features sitting above the results decide how much of a query’s demand a page can still receive, or whether a page is the right asset at all. A local pack answers the query with a business listing, a shopping carousel with a product feed, a knowledge panel with a record of an entity. Search volume measures demand for the query. Feature composition decides how much of it is reachable by anything you could publish.

Why do SERP features matter for SEO strategy?

Position alone no longer predicts traffic. In Ahrefs’ sample, the average position-one click-through rate for informational queries that trigger no AI Overview at all still fell from 7.6% in December 2023 to 3.9% in December 2025.² Where an AI Overview does appear, your page may instead be cited inside it, generating brand exposure without a click.

The results page is a composition rather than a ranked list. Knowing what that composition looks like for each query shapes how you measure success and what kind of content you produce for it.

Which SERP features appear, and how often?

Prevalence is the number that matters here, because it decides how much of a query’s demand survives to the organic results. The figures below are Ahrefs’ June 2025 sample of a million US desktop results unless stated otherwise; each feature’s own page carries the mechanics and how to earn it.¹

Feature	Appears on	What it takes from the organic result	Covered in full
Sitelinks	84.95%	Nothing; expands your own result	-
People Also Ask	79.13%	Little traffic, but names the sub-questions	PAA boxes
AI Overviews	15.69–25.11%	Substantial; citation without a click	AI Overviews
Top Stories	14.20%	The whole query, for publishers	News SEO
Featured snippets	5.53%	Replaces your listing rather than adding one	Featured snippets
Local pack	2.96%	Nearly all of it, on the queries it appears on	Google Business Profile
Knowledge panels	not sampled	The entity answer itself	Knowledge panels
Rich snippets	not sampled	Nothing; enhances your own result	Rich results
Video carousels	not sampled	Redirects intent to YouTube	YouTube search
AI Mode	separate tab	Complex and multi-step queries	Google AI Mode
Shopping carousels	not sampled	Commercial intent, via a Merchant Centre feed	-

The AI Overviews range is different samples rather than a trend, and a third sits above both: Conductor recorded 25.11% across 21.9 million US searches over four weeks from 15 September to 12 October 2025, Semrush put it at 15.69% in November 2025 after a July peak of 24.61%,³⁴ and the same Ahrefs sample the rest of this table comes from recorded 27.43% in June 2025, up from 3.93% in January.¹ Three panels, three windows, no reconciliation between them; treat any single figure as that panel on that date. As of May 2026 AI Overviews reach 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode over one billion.⁵⁶ Generative UI is not a separate feature in this list, which is why it has no row: it is how the two AI surfaces render. Search builds a custom explanation, calculator or simulation on the fly instead of returning a fixed layout, inside an AI Overview or inside AI Mode. It reached AI Mode alongside Gemini 3 in November 2025, and on 19 August 2026 Google said it had launched globally in English in AI Mode and begun rolling out in AI Overviews.⁷ For keyword research the consequence is the same as any other AI surface, only sharper: a query answered by a generated calculator has had its demand absorbed rather than redistributed.

What do the prevalence figures not show?

AI Overviews have moved down the funnel. 91.3% of AI Overview queries were informational in January 2025 and 57.1% by October, with commercial, transactional and navigational shares all rising.⁴ A feature that once clipped only research queries now reaches buying ones.

They are not scarcer on sensitive topics, which runs against a common assumption. Conductor’s benchmark put health care highest at 48.75% of queries and financials second at 25.79%, with real estate lowest at 4.48%.³

A featured snippet replaces your listing, and there are far fewer of them to replace it with. Since 22 January 2020 a page that earns the snippet no longer also appears as a regular result on page one, so it is a substitution rather than an extra slot above your existing one.⁸ The prevalence figure in the table above is also the steepest fall in the Ahrefs sample: featured snippets went from 15.41% of results in January 2025 to 5.53% in June, a 64% drop, which is why the study is titled “Goodbye, Featured Snippets”.¹ Planning a page around winning one is a thinner bet than it was.

Sitelinks are no longer a branded-query feature. Ahrefs recorded them on 84.95% of results in June 2025, up from 8.44% in January, and attributes the jump to scroll-to sitelinks, which unlike internal sitelinks appear on non-branded queries too.¹ They are not directly controllable, but they reflect site structure and internal linking quality.

One more caveat on planning around any of these: the eligible set shrinks as well as grows. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search on 7 May 2026, so FAQPage markup no longer produces one, and no platform documents reading it for AI answers.⁹ Check Google’s current documentation before building a page around a specific feature.

How do SERP features affect CTR?

Features don’t uniformly reduce clicks. Their effect depends on search intent:

• Navigational queries (brand searches, “X login”): sitelinks improve CTR for the target brand
• Informational queries: AI Overviews and featured snippets often answer the query without a click; impressions rise, CTR falls. Ahrefs compared 150,000 keywords with an AI Overview against 150,000 informational keywords without one and found that an AI Overview’s presence “correlates with a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page”.²
• Transactional queries: shopping carousels capture commercial intent; organic results below them still convert well for users who scroll
• Local queries: local pack dominates; organic results below see very low CTR unless the local pack doesn’t match what the searcher wants

When tracking rankings for a query, always check the SERP composition. A position 3 result below an AI Overview and a featured snippet performs very differently from a position 3 result with no features above it.

AI Mode adds a further layer, since queries resolved inside it often generate no organic click at all. Some of that visibility is now measurable: Google’s Search Generative AI performance report in Search Console covers impressions from both AI Overviews and AI Mode. It carries impressions only, with no click or query data, and reached all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026 after a staged rollout that began in the UK in June.¹⁰

How does SERP composition affect traffic forecasting?

Traditional traffic models (position × average CTR) were built for a ten-blue-links results page. They overestimate traffic for queries where features displace clicks, and they say nothing at all about queries whose demand is met by a listing or a feed rather than by a page. When building traffic projections:

• Check SERP composition for your target queries before estimating CTR
• Apply lower CTR assumptions for informational queries where AI Overviews are likely
• Apply higher CTR multipliers for queries where your page could win a featured snippet
• Discount or exclude queries a page cannot serve: local packs, shopping carousels, and knowledge panels are won with a business profile, a product feed, or an entity record
• Track impressions alongside clicks, since AI Overview citations still carry brand value without a direct click

How to target SERP features

For targeting how-tos, including how to structure content for featured snippets, which schema types enable rich snippets, how to get into the local pack, and how to track feature performance in GSC, see How to Target SERP Features.

Footnotes

1. Goodbye, Featured Snippets: How SERP Features Have Evolved in the AI Era — Ahrefs ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58% — Ahrefs ↩ ↩²

3. 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report — Conductor, a live page (marked “last updated 6 July 2026” when read on 21 September 2026). The trigger rates are Conductor’s own measurement across its search index, not a Google figure. ↩ ↩²

4. Semrush AI Overviews Study — Semrush ↩ ↩²

5. Google CEO Pichai: AI Overviews now has over 2.5 billion monthly users — CNBC ↩

6. Google Search I/O 2026 — Google Blog ↩

7. How Google Search, Lens and AI Mode can help you study — Google Blog ↩

8. Listings that earn featured snippets will not repeat on the first page of Google search — Search Engine Land ↩

9. Deprecating the FAQ rich result feature — Google Search Central changelog ↩

10. Generative AI performance report — Google Search Help. Carries Google’s note: “As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide.” ↩