Another study shows how featured snippets steal significant traffic from the top organic result

A new study released today by Ahrefs shows how featured snippets have a negative impact on clicks to the first organic search result.

Ahrefs analyzed two million featured snippets and found that the first organic result shows a significant drop in click-through rate when a featured snippet is present. Without a featured snippet, the first result gets a 26 percent click-through rate. With it, it only gets a 19.6 percent click-through rate, and the featured snippet gets an 8.6 percent click-through rate. Here is the chart from Ahrefs:

The study also shows that the presence of a featured snippet means fewer clicks overall for the organic search results:

Out of the 112 million keywords that Ahrefs analyzed:

• 12.29 percent of search queries have featured snippets in the search results.
• Only 30.9 percent of featured snippets rank at the very top placement in the organic results.
• 99.58 percent of the featured snippets are already in the top 10 positions in Google.
• The vast majority of featured snippets are triggered by long-tail keywords.
• Wikipedia has by far the most amount of featured snippets in Google.
• Featured snippets often change sources.

This follows another featured snippets study we posted last week that looked at 1.4 million queries and hundreds of thousands of featured snippets.

I have only summarized some of the findings from the Ahrefs study, so check out the full results over here.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.