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.