SERP features are the parts of a Google results page that are not a standard link to a web page. A results page used to be ten links. Today the links share the page with answer boxes, question stacks, AI summaries, image strips, video results and lists of other searches, and they often sit lower than they used to. If you write for search, these Google SERP features decide how much of the page you can actually win, and whether a searcher needs to click at all.
This guide covers what counts as a SERP feature, what Google says about the main ones, which have changed or gone away, and a practical way to do SERP feature tracking for your own searches. People Also Ask has a guide of its own: if it is new to you, read what People Also Ask is and how it works alongside this one.
What counts as a SERP feature?
“SERP feature” is industry shorthand, not a Google term. SERP stands for search engine results page. Google’s own vocabulary lives in its Visual Elements gallery, a Search Central page that names the pieces of a results page. It lists four result types (text, rich, image and video results) plus what it calls exploration features. It also names the parts of a single result, such as the title link, snippet, site name, favicon and breadcrumb.
Three of the groups it names are worth knowing by their Google names:
- Sitelinks group: “Two or more links from the same domain or its localized variations that are clustered together under a text result.”
- Related questions group: “a cluster of questions that are related to what the user initially searched for”, better known as People Also Ask.
- Related searches group: “a cluster of related searches that other people have done.”
The gallery does not mention People Also Search For, AI Overviews or zero-click searches, even though all three come up constantly in SEO work. So in practice, when marketers talk about SERP features, they mean any element that changes the shape of the page, whether Google documents it in the gallery or not.
The main Google SERP features, grouped by job
It helps to sort the features by what they do for the searcher, because that tells you what they do to your traffic.
| Job | Features | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Answer the question on the page | Featured snippets, AI Overviews, People Also Ask answers | Your words can be shown, and credited, without a click |
| Suggest the next search | People Also Ask questions, People Also Search For, related searches, autocomplete | A free look at how Google connects one search to the next |
| Add detail to one result | Sitelinks, rich results, images and video thumbnails | A bigger, more clickable listing |
| Show another kind of result | Image results, video results, local and shopping units | Competition from formats other than web pages |
This hub focuses on the first two rows, where most of the change has been and where people who write content have the most say.
Answer features: featured snippets
A featured snippet is a short extract from one page, shown in a box with a link to that page. Google’s Search Central page calls them “special boxes where the format of a regular search result is reversed”: the answer first, the link second. Its Search Help page says they appear “at the top of the search results”, “in the ‘People also ask’ section” and next to Knowledge Graph information, and that Google “picks them based on how well they answer your question and how helpful they are.”
Can you mark a page as a featured snippet? “You can’t,” says the Search Central page. Google’s systems decide. What you can do is make the page easy to quote, or opt out with the nosnippet rule, a lower max-snippet value or the data-nosnippet attribute. We go through the whole process in our guide to featured snippets.
Did snippets survive the arrival of AI answers? Google still maintains the page, last updated on 10 December 2025, and we weigh up the evidence in do featured snippets still exist?
Question and search-suggestion features
Four features show you how Google links one search to the next. They look alike, and people mix them up, but each one appears at a different moment and holds a different kind of data.
People Also Ask
People Also Ask (PAA) is the box of questions that opens one at a time and adds more questions as you go. It is the feature this site is built around, so it has its own pillar: what People Also Ask is in Google. In this hub, the PAA page that matters is what happened to People Also Ask?, which tells the story of how its answers changed.
People Also Search For
People Also Search For is a short list of other searches that can appear after you click a result and then come back to Google. It is the most searched feature in this hub and the least documented by Google, which does not list it in the Visual Elements gallery. Our page on people also search for covers where it shows up, how it differs from PAA, and how to use it for keyword research.
Related searches
Related searches is the block of other searches, usually near the bottom of the page. Google documents it as the related searches group, quoted above. Because it sits where few searchers scroll, it is easy to forget, and it is also one of the simplest free keyword sources there is. See what related searches are on Google.
Autocomplete
Autocomplete is not on the results page at all. It works in the search box, before you search. Google’s help page says the predictions “reflect real searches that have been done on Google” and are shaped by the language of the query, its location, trending interest and your past searches. We explain how google autocomplete works, and we compare the two question tools head to head in the difference between Google Autocomplete and People Also Ask.
| When it shows | What it holds | Documented by Google? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Autocomplete | While you type | Predicted completions of your search | Yes, in Search Help |
| People Also Ask | On the results page | Full questions that open to answers | Yes, as the related questions group |
| People Also Search For | After you click a result and come back | Short related searches | Not in the Visual Elements gallery |
| Related searches | Usually near the bottom of the page | Short related searches | Yes, as the related searches group |
People Also Ask and AI Overviews, briefly
The biggest change on the results page in the last two years is AI. Google announced on 14 May 2024 that AI Overviews would “begin rolling out to everyone in the U.S., with more countries coming soon.” Since then, AI answers have also moved into People Also Ask: AlsoAsked’s data put them at 97% of PAA answers in the first week of September 2026, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable. The full timeline is on what happened to People Also Ask?
Google does not publish how often AI Overviews appear. In October 2026, Search Engine Roundtable collected industry data: SE Ranking found them on 82.5% of US brand searches, and seoClarity said it saw them on “over 62% of queries,” from 55% to 84% depending on industry. Those samples measure different things, so read them as a direction, not one number.
For site owners, Google’s AI features page says “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” How AI Overviews compare with People Also Ask, and how far to trust them, is covered in our AI search guide: the difference between People Also Ask and AI Overviews.
When the answer is on the page: zero-click searches
When a feature answers the question on the results page, the searcher may never click. SEO people call those zero-click searches. How many searches end that way, and whether AI makes it worse, is one of the most argued-over numbers in search. Google’s own position, on its AI features page, is that “when people click from search results pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality.” Independent studies measure something different. We set the figures side by side, with who measured what, in what zero-click searches are.
Features that shrank or disappeared
SERP features come and go, and tracking is partly about noticing when one you relied on goes away. The clearest example is the FAQ rich result, the expandable questions that used to sit under a result for pages with FAQ markup.
- 8 August 2023. Google announced that FAQ rich results “will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites”, and that HowTo rich results would only show to desktop users. An update to the same post says that “as of September 13, Google Search no longer shows How-to rich results on desktop.”
- 8 May 2026. Google’s documentation changelog added a deprecation notice: the FAQ rich result “will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026.”
- 15 June 2026. The same changelog removed the FAQ documentation because “the FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results.”
What that means for the markup today is on does FAQ schema still work?
Why SERP features are worth tracking
Rankings alone don’t tell you what a searcher sees. Position three under an AI Overview, a PAA box and a video strip is a very different place from position three on a page of ten links. Tracking features helps you answer questions like these:
- Which of my target searches show an AI Overview, and is my site cited in it?
- Do I hold the featured snippet, or does a competitor?
- Did a drop in clicks come from losing rankings, or from a new feature pushing my result down?
It feeds content planning too. If that is your main interest, our guide to question keywords goes deeper on the research side.
How to do SERP feature tracking
No single tool shows you everything. A good routine combines three sources: Google Search Console, your own checks of the live page, and saved snapshots you can compare over time. Commercial rank trackers can add feature data across hundreds of keywords, but each samples differently, so their figures rarely match.
1. Start with Google Search Console
Search Console is the only data you get from Google about your own site. Its Performance report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, and its default view covers the past three months. Search appearance is one of its dimension tabs.
The catch is in how Google counts. Its help page on how impressions, position and clicks are counted sets out rules that matter for features:
- “Each element in Search results occupies a single position.” Ads do not take one.
- A featured snippet “(typically) occupies position 1”, so a jump to position 1 can be a snippet win.
- “An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results”, and all its links get that same position.
- A carousel takes a single position, and every item in it gets that position.
- For expandable items such as People Also Ask, “when the item is expanded, an impression is counted for any links within the expanding section.” If nobody opens the question, your link inside it may never count as seen.
- “If a link is a query refinement link, clicks and impressions are not counted for that link.”
Google’s AI features page adds that traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is “reported on in the Performance report, within the ‘Web’ search type.” It is mixed in with your normal search data rather than broken out. So Search Console tells you that something happened to your clicks. It often can’t tell you which feature caused it.
2. Check the live results yourself
For the searches that matter most, look at the page. Run the search, note which features appear, in what order, and who is credited in each. Results differ by location, device and whether you are signed in, so keep your checks consistent: same browser setup, same country, ideally signed out.
Manual checks don’t scale, but they catch what tools miss, like a layout test or People Also Search For, which may only appear after you click a result and come back.
3. Save the People Also Ask box itself
Rank trackers usually tell you that a PAA box appeared. They rarely tell you every question inside it, because the box grows as you click. That is the gap our tool, PAA Box, fills. It is a free Chrome extension that opens every People Also Ask question for a search, in your own Chrome, up to four levels deep (D0 to D3), and exports the whole tree to CSV, with each question’s depth and parent and the date in the file name.
That date is what turns an export into tracking. Run the same search each month and compare the files: which questions are new, which dropped out, and how far the box drifts from your topic. PAA Box Pro’s “With answers” mode also saves Google’s answer and source for every question, so you can search the CSV for your own domain. PAA Box reads People Also Ask only, not the other features in this guide. The steps are in how PAA Box works and our guide to exporting People Also Ask questions.
A simple monthly routine
- Pick 20 to 50 searches that matter to your business. Keep the list fixed so months compare cleanly.
- Once a month, check each one live and note the features present: AI Overview, featured snippet, PAA, People Also Search For, related searches, video, images, local results.
- For your top searches, export the PAA box to CSV and save it with the others.
- Note who is credited in the featured snippet and the AI Overview, and whether it is you.
- Compare against Search Console for the same period. Where clicks fell but position held, look for a new feature above you.
- Turn what you find into work: questions to answer, pages to tighten, snippets to chase.
SERP features at a glance
| Feature | What Google says | Can you influence it? | How to track it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Featured snippet | “You can’t” mark a page as one; Google’s systems decide | Indirectly, by answering clearly; opt out with snippet controls | Live checks; position 1 in Search Console |
| People Also Ask | “A cluster of questions that are related to what the user initially searched for” | Indirectly, through the same eligibility as snippets and AI answers | Live checks; dated CSV exports |
| AI Overview | “No additional requirements” or special optimizations | Indirectly; opt out with nosnippet and related controls | Live checks; inside Search Console “Web” data |
| People Also Search For | Not in the Visual Elements gallery | No; it reflects other searches | Live checks after clicking a result |
| Related searches | “A cluster of related searches that other people have done” | No | Live checks |
| FAQ rich result | No longer shown in Google Search since May 2026 | No | Nothing left to track |
What to do with what you find
Tracking only pays off if it changes what you publish. Common patterns:
- An AI Overview sits on most of your key searches. Make sure the pages are indexed and allowed to show a snippet, then focus on being the clearest source on the question. Google says there are no special optimizations, so the basics carry the weight.
- A competitor holds the featured snippet. Look at how their page answers the question, then write a clearer, more direct answer under a matching heading.
- The PAA box is full of questions you don’t answer. Those are content gaps with Google’s own wording attached. See how to turn People Also Ask into a content plan.
- The PAA box stops showing, or behaves oddly. Sometimes it is a Google test, sometimes a browser issue. Our page on why People Also Ask isn’t working covers the usual causes.
One caution from Google itself. In November 2024, Google’s John Mueller agreed that People Also Ask, like Google Trends, can tempt sites into writing pages they shouldn’t. “Definitely them too,” he wrote, adding that “it can be tempting to create a content liability on your website,” as reported by Search Engine Roundtable. Use what these features show you to understand your audience, not as a list of pages to churn out.