SERP Features

What are SERP Features?

SERP features are unique elements that appear on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) that go beyond the traditional “10 blue links”. Common examples of SERP features include AI Overviews, Knowledge Panels, video carousels and image packs.

These search features answer questions directly, showcase rich visuals, and offer quick access to specific information. All of this improves the user experience.

These are the most common types of SERP features (we’ll dive into each in more detail later):

• AI Overviews: AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of results for many informational queries. Now one of the most prominent SERP features, with real implications for organic CTR.
• Featured Snippets: Increasingly less common, but you can still find these concise answers pulled from websites, displayed above organic results.
• Top and Bottom Ads: Traditional text-based advertisements displayed at the top or bottom of search engine results.
• Video Carousels: Rotating or swipeable collections of video results relevant to your search.
• Popular Products: Product recommendations in the SERP with prices, ratings, and purchase options.
• Rich Results: Enhanced information like reviews, ratings, and recipe ingredients directly in search results.
• Sitelinks: Additional links to specific web pages within a website displayed under the main result.
• People Also Ask: Related questions and answers directly below the main search result.
• Local Pack: Map and listings for local businesses relevant to the search query.
• Knowledge Panels: Informative boxes about entities like people, places, and things.
• Image Packs: Grids of thumbnails showcasing visually relevant images related to your query.
• Discussions, Forums, and Social Posts: Rich media snippets from social media and forums displayed within search results.
• Top Stories Carousel: Rotating carousel of news stories relevant to the query.

In short:

A SERP without any SERP features looks like this:

And one with SERP features looks like this:

How Common are Google SERP Features?

It’s extremely rare to find a set of Google results without any SERP features.

According to Semrush Sensor data from March 2026, only 1.16% of Google’s first page results are without SERP features of any kind.

This is why it’s important to take SERP features into account when choosing keywords and optimizing your content for organic CTR. Once you’ve checked the SERP for a topic/keyword you’re aiming to rank for, you can get a better understanding of the type of content Google and users prefer and the common questions that crop up.

13 Most Important SERP Features

Here are the 13 most common SERP Features that appear in Google. These also tend to have a significant impact on how people interact with Google’s search results.

1. AI Overviews

AI Overviews may have had a bumpy start in early 2024, but today, it’s a common element to find in search results.

Semrush Sensor data from March 2026 shows that AI Overviews appear in more than 30% of searches.

AI Overviews pull information from multiple sources, and blend it into one single answer. The citations are displayed to the right of that answer.

Basically, this compresses the entire SERP: more answers at the top, fewer clicks below.

Since AI Overviews appear above the organic #1 result, they can suppress CTR to organic listings even when you rank at the top of the page.

In SERPs with an AI Overview, optimizing for AI SEO is now table stakes. And it presents a unique opportunity: if your brand is mentioned in an AI Overview, you can gain visibility without even ranking at the top of the page.

Further reading: How to Rank in AI Search (New Strategy & Framework)

2. Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets are large boxes that highlight a specific section of a webpage, and present that section inside of the results themselves.

The most common types of Featured Snippets are:

• The Definition Box: A snippet of text designed to give users a direct definition or description, usually concise
• The Table: Snippet that shows data that Google pulled from a page and displayed in a table format
• The Ordered List: A snippet that presents items in a specific order. Google usually uses Ordered Lists for queries that rank things in a specific order or queries that need a set of steps
• The Unordered List: A snippet that lists items that don’t need to be in any particular orders

Today, Featured Snippets are no longer as common as they used to be. According to data from Semrush Sensor in March 2026, Featured Snippets only appear in 0.24% of searches.

3. Top and Bottom Ads

Google’s SERPs have two main Google Ads advertising slots:

One at the very top of the page (above the organic listings). And another at the bottom of the page.

Wordstream data from 2025 shows that the average CTR for a Google ad is about 6%, which was an increase from the previous year. But this also varies greatly by industry.

4. Video Carousels

Video carousels are a set of videos that appear either above or within the organic results.

In most cases, these are pulled directly from YouTube:

But videos can also show up in results from other places.

In some SERPs, you might find a “Short videos” feature, highlighting short videos from YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok.

Across all categories, Semrush Sensor data shows that videos show up within search results 52% of the time, and video carousels are seen in 28% of searches.

But, depending on the category, that can go much higher. For example, for Hobbies and Leisure searches, you’ll see videos in 73% of search results, and video carousels in 43%.

5. Popular Products

According to Semrush data from March 2026, searchers will see Popular Products in 59% of shopping queries:

This visual SERP feature showcases products, including images, prices, ratings, and direct links to merchants.

Usually, it’ll show up as cards above or within the organic listings.

The most direct way to get your products to show up here is to keep your Google Merchant Center Feed up to date, and use structured data—like “Product” or “Offer” schema markup—to highlight up-to-date information about your products.

6. Rich Results

Rich results (or rich snippets) are extra pieces of information that appear next to one specific result.

They’re basically SERP features for a specific result in the SERPs.

As you probably know, most Google results are made up of a title tag, a description and a URL.

Well, rich snippets add additional information that goes well beyond those 3 elements.

Which helps users decide whether or not to click on it.

For example, certain results show price and availability information as a rich snippet.

So if you’re shopping for a specific product, this can help you find the info you need without needing to hunt through a giant ecommerce product page.

Recipe snippets are another common form of rich results. They might show cook time, ratings, or calorie counts directly in the results.

Want your results to show up with rich snippets? Implementing structured data on your page can dramatically increase the odds of getting rich snippets.

7. Sitelinks

Sitelinks come in two main forms:

Links that take searchers to a page on a website.

Or those that take searchers to a section of a page.

Either way, sitelinks are designed to present a list of links underneath a traditional result. That way, users can jump directly to a page or content that they want to see.

The most common forms of sitelinks are those that appear underneath a homepage for branded searches.

See why that’s helpful? If you search for “Semrush”, it can be hard for Google to understand exactly what you’re looking for from that site: the homepage? The About page? A page to login?

And sitelinks help you quickly find the page you want to visit.

It’s the same story with page-level sitelinks. They allow you to scan the main sections of a page. And, when you click, you’re taken to that section of the content.

8. People Also Ask Boxes

According to Advanced Web Ranking, People Also Ask (PAA) boxes show up in 53% of all US-based search queries.

You’ve likely seen PAA boxes before. They’re essentially mini FAQs embedded in the organic search results and are related to the original search query.

And when you click on them, they expand with an answer. And generate more related questions.

Google’s goal with PAA is to give users an easy way to find answers to their next query… before they even search for it.

For example, the keyword “tennis backhand” brings up a PAA box.

As you can see, the PAA is designed to answer the question that person might want an answer to right then. Or one that he or she would search for next.

9. Local Packs

Local Packs (also known as “The Map Pack”) are a set of local results that shows up for a query that Google considers “local”.

(For example, “personal injury lawyer miami” or “personal injury lawyer near me”).

What’s unique about local packs is that they kind of have their own parallel algorithm. While many of Google’s ranking factors are focused on backlinks, local SEO is more about optimizing your Google My Business profile, getting good reviews, and accurate name, address, and phone number (NAP) citations.

Local packs are super important for businesses with a physical location.

That’s because local packs usually appear prominently in the search results. They also contain an interactive Google Maps map, and other visual elements that help it stand out from the organic Google search results.

10. Knowledge Panels

Knowledge Panels are featured snippet-type boxes located on the right-hand side of the page that display data that Google has on a specific entity (like a famous person, company, or event).

Here’s an example of a Knowledge Card:

What makes Knowledge Panels different from featured snippets is that the data isn’t pulled from a specific webpage. Instead, Google gets the information from The Google Knowledge Graph.The Knowledge Graph itself is sourced from a variety of sources, like Wikipedia.

11. Image Packs

An image pack is a series of images that Google displays in the search results.

(Those images come from Google Images).

In other words, Google identifies search queries where users want to see a set of images. Sometimes, these queries are obvious (like “pictures of cats”). But other times, Google is able to figure out which queries should have an image pack based on user behavior. That’s why image SEO is so important.

For example, take a keyword like “press release”. You may not expect that search to bring up an image pack. But it does.

That’s likely because Google has tested the results with and without an image pack. And the search results with an image pack gave searchers what they wanted. So they decided to show it by default moving forward.

12. Discussions, Forums, and Social Posts

Google has significantly expanded how it surfaces user-generated content in search results.

What used to be called “X (Twitter) Cards” has become part of a much bigger shift: social posts, forum threads, and community discussions now appear across multiple SERP features.

The most prominent version of these is the “Discussion and forums” carousel, which Google rolled out in 2024. It includes Reddit threads, Quora answers, and other forum discussions that are relevant to the search.

A related feature is “What people are saying,” which surfaces social media posts, videos and blog content highlighting different user perspectives on a topic.

X (Twitter) cards — once a standalone SERP feature showing a user’s recent tweets — still appear for branded and trending queries, but are now just one piece of a broader social content ecosystem in search.

Here’s why it matters for SEO: Your brand’s presence on Reddit, Quora, and other forums is becoming a search visibility question, not just a community question.

Genuine participation in relevant discussions can help you earn placements in these features that traditional content can’t capture.

13. Top Stories

Top stories are results that show up for terms related to a trending news story.

Google keeps track of trending stories (specifically, in Google News). And understands when a search matches a story that’s getting lots of traction.

In this SERP feature, 100% of the results in the news box are from Google News approved websites.

Now That You Know the SERP Landscape…

Understanding which features appear for your target keywords is step one. The real work is optimizing your content to show up in them.

Start with your on-page SEO fundamentals. Those are the foundation for earning rich results, featured snippets, and AI Overview citations. Our On-Page SEO guide covers exactly that.

And if you’re ready to build the team that executes all of this, the next resource in this Advance SEO Strategies hub covers how to put together a high-performing SEO dream team.