Yet another study shows featured snippets lead to significant drops in organic clicks

With Google showing more and more featured snippets, more studies are coming out showing how they impact the core web results.

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In the past few weeks, we’ve had two studies that analyzed the impact of featured snippets in Google’s search results. Today, we have a new one from Visme published on the Ahrefs blog that shows search results with featured snippets lead to an 18.5 percent decrease in clicks on the main organic results.

Nayomi Chibana from Visme analyzed 5,126 keywords and found 11,065 SERP features, including featured snippets, related searches, image packs and more. The data revealed that the more features appearing in a set of search results, the fewer clicks there are on the regular, organic results.

Here’s a chart showing Google search results with featured snippets resulted in 18.5 percent fewer clicks than those without the non-organic feature:

Clicks With And Without Featured Snippets 2

The study showed that over 50 percent of the queries did show featured snippets. Here is a chart showing the percentage of time a feature will show in the Google results:

Informational Queries With SERP Features

With featured snippets very likely to show in the Google results, this can be a concern for the site that doesn’t show up as the featured snippet.

This study is filled with great data, and you can read the full study over here.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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