What Are Google SERP Features and How Do They Work?
A results page is no longer ten links. Most of what appears on one cannot be requested. The useful way to understand them is by which features markup influences and which it does not, because businesses assume it produces all of them.
A Results Page Is Not Ten Links
The picture most people carry is a numbered list of results. That describes very few searches now. A screen can be substantially occupied before an ordinary result appears at all.
What the old model was. A ranked list.
Ten results, each a title, an address and a short description, in order of assessed relevance. Simple, predictable and the basis of how most people still picture the exercise.
What now appears. A great deal else.
Answer boxes, question lists, map results, image rows, video panels, product listings, information panels and paid placements, arranged differently depending on what was asked.
Why the change matters commercially. Position is not the whole story.
Being first among the ordinary results means less when several features sit above them. What matters is how much of the screen is spoken for before somebody reaches an ordinary result.
Why it varies so much. The query decides.
A question gets an answer box. A place gets a map. A product gets listings. The same site can face an uncluttered page for one search and a crowded one for another.
Who decides what you see. Not the site.
Every one of these is placed by the search engine rather than requested by anybody. A business can influence some of them and specify none of them, which is a distinction worth holding on to before reading any proposal about them.
What this page is for. Sorting them.
Understanding which of these you can influence, which you can only earn and which you cannot affect at all. That distinction is the whole value here.
Which Of These Schema Affects
Three categories. Almost every misunderstanding about markup comes from not separating them. Some features draw on your markup, some draw on your page regardless of markup, then some draw on sources you do not control at all.
The first category. Features that use markup.
Where the enhancement is built from properties you described, with the markup genuinely the mechanism. Breadcrumb paths and product details sit here. They are the minority.
The second category. Features drawn from the page.
Where the content is read directly, whatever you have or have not described. Answer boxes work this way, which is why writing well matters and marking up does not help.
The third category. Features drawn from elsewhere.
Where the information comes from sources across the web, from a separate listing, else from behaviour. Information panels and map results sit here. Your markup contributes little.
Why the confusion is expensive. Effort in the wrong place.
A business wanting a panel adds markup and waits. A business wanting an answer box adds markup instead of improving the answer. Both spent effort on something structurally incapable of producing the outcome.
How to use this page. Check the category first.
Each block below sits in one of the three. Knowing which tells you immediately whether markup is the lever, whether writing is, else whether neither is.
Knowledge Panels
The information panel that appears beside results for a recognised business, person or thing. Assembled from many sources, contributed to rather than determined by your markup. Impossible to request.
What one contains. A summary of an entity.
A name, a description, contact details, links and whatever else has been established about the subject. Presented as settled fact, which is why businesses want one.
Where the information comes from. Many places.
Reference sources, licensed data, the business's own site, its listings and other coverage across the web. Your description is an input rather than the source.
What markup contributes. Clarity about who you are.
Describing your organisation and connecting your other presences helps establish that these things are one business, which organisation markup covers. That is a contribution rather than a mechanism.
Why nobody can promise one. There is no route.
No submission process exists. Anybody offering to obtain a panel is describing something outside their control, which is worth recognising when it appears in a proposal.
What actually leads to one. Being established.
Recognition across enough independent sources that the subject is treated as a known thing. That is earned over years and is not a markup exercise.
Featured Snippets
The answer box appearing above ordinary results, containing an extract from a page. Drawn directly from content rather than from any markup, which is the single most useful fact about it.
What it looks like. An answer, then a link.
A paragraph, list or table lifted from a page, attributed to it, presented as a direct response to the question. The page it comes from usually also appears in the ordinary results.
Why markup does not apply. The content is read directly.
Nothing is described into an answer box. The text is taken from the page as written, which means the lever is how the answer is written rather than how it is described.
What that implies. Writing is the work.
Answering the question early, plainly and completely is what makes a passage usable. That is a writing discipline rather than a technical one.
Where the how-to lives. Our blogging material.
Writing for one is covered properly in our content and blogging guides, which own that subject. This page covers the feature as one among several and deliberately does not repeat it.
The trade worth knowing. A complete answer may cost the click.
Somebody whose question is fully answered in the box may not need your page. That is a genuine consideration and the blogging material treats it at length.
People Also Ask
The expandable list of related questions. Its most valuable property has nothing to do with appearing in it: it is a visible list of the questions associated with a subject, which is research nobody has to pay for.
What it shows. Adjacent questions.
Questions connected to the one asked, each expanding to an extract from some page. The list frequently extends as you open items.
Why appearing in it is not the point. The same trade as answer boxes.
Being the extract shown puts your answer in front of somebody who may then not visit. Worth having and not worth building a strategy around.
What it is genuinely worth. Knowing the questions.
It is a published list of what people ask around your subject, assembled from actual behaviour rather than from guesswork. That is the useful part and it costs nothing to read.
How to use it. As a source of subjects.
The questions there are ones somebody is asking, which makes them candidates for pages and for the questions sections on pages you already have. Our keyword research material covers turning that into a plan.
The caution. Not every question deserves a page.
A question being listed does not mean answering it will bring you anybody useful. The topic choice arguments in our blogging material apply directly.
Review Snippets
Star ratings shown in results. For most local businesses these come from the profile rather than from the site, which means the markup people ask about is not where their stars would come from anyway.
The two sources. Profile and page.
Ratings can come from reviews collected on a business profile, which appear in map results and listings. Or from review markup on a page, which is a different mechanism producing a different appearance.
Which one people mean. Almost always the profile.
The stars a local business pictures are the ones beside a map result. Those are gathered and displayed by the platform, with no markup involved at any point.
Why that matters. It answers the question properly.
Somebody asking how to get stars usually needs a review process on their profile rather than an implementation. How to get star ratings opens on exactly that.
The rule, restated. Real reviews only.
Where markup is involved, it may only describe genuine reviews from real customers about the thing on that page. Never invented, never aggregated from elsewhere, never applied to a page with none.
Why it is restated here. This is where people arrive.
Somebody reading about results features is frequently looking for stars specifically, so the rule belongs where the question is asked as well as where it is argued.
Sitelinks
The additional links appearing beneath a result, leading to other pages on the same site. Generated rather than submitted. What influences them is a clear structure rather than any markup.
What they do. Offer a shortcut.
Somebody searching a business name gets links to the sections they probably want. Useful for the visitor and a substantial amount of space for the site.
What businesses want to know. How to choose them.
You cannot. There is no submission, no list to supply and no way to specify which pages appear. That is the single most asked question about this feature and the answer is unsatisfying.
What does influence them. Structure and clarity.
A site with coherent sections, sensible names and clear internal linking gives something to work from. A flat pile of pages with vague titles gives nothing.
Why this connects to breadcrumbs. Same underlying requirement.
Both depend on the site having a real hierarchy. Breadcrumb markup makes the same point. Our advanced material covers information architecture properly.
The practical consequence. Fix the structure.
Where sitelinks are poor or absent, the answer is almost always organising the site rather than describing it differently.
Image Carousels
The row of images appearing for visual queries. What influences appearing there is mostly the images themselves and how they are presented, rather than a description of them.
What triggers one. A visual question.
Queries where somebody wants to see something rather than read about it. Products, places, styles, examples of work and anything where appearance is the subject.
What actually matters. The images.
Whether they are yours, whether they are good, whether they load properly and whether the page they sit on is genuinely about the subject. Ordinary quality rather than technique.
The technical floor. Being readable at all.
Images have to load, have meaningful filenames and carry descriptive alternative text. That is a low bar and a great many sites fail it, usually because images were uploaded straight from a camera.
What the alternative text does. Two jobs.
It describes the image for anybody who cannot see it. It is also most of what anything reading the page knows about the image. Both reasons point the same way.
Where businesses waste effort. Stock photography.
Generic images used by hundreds of other sites are unlikely to distinguish you anywhere. Photographs of your own work do more, at less cost than most people assume.
The Feature That Was Withdrawn
A feature once existed that placed a search box inside a result, letting somebody search a site directly from the results page. It was removed. Markup implementing it now produces nothing.
What it did. Searched your site from the results.
For recognised brand searches, a field appeared beneath the top result. Somebody could type into it and go straight to a search on that site rather than to its home page.
When it went. Announced October 2024, removed the following month.
Google announced on its Search Central blog that it was retiring the feature, citing dropped usage and a wish to simplify results. The element was removed globally, in all languages and regions, from 21 November 2024.
What Google said about the markup. Leave it.
The announcement stated the change affects neither rankings nor other sitelinks, that the Search Console report and Rich Results Test highlighting would be removed, then that existing markup need not be taken out since it causes no issues and simply goes unused.
Why this block exists. Somebody implemented it.
Anybody who added this and later wondered why it stopped appearing has a straightforward answer. Guidance still recommending it is describing something that has not existed for some time.
What it cost the people who implemented it. Nothing, then something.
The removal took no traffic away, since the box was a convenience rather than a position. The real cost is misplaced effort: time spent implementing a dead feature, else trusting something that still adds markup nothing reads.
What it illustrates. The pattern in block ten.
A feature launched, was implemented widely, declined in use and was withdrawn. That sequence has repeated several times and it is the reason for the closing position.
Features Come And Go
Several features have been added and withdrawn in recent years. Building a strategy on any single one is unwise. That is the most durable thing this page can tell you.
What has gone. More than people realise.
Expandable question results were restricted and then removed entirely. Step-by-step results were deprecated on every device. The search box described above was withdrawn. Several smaller types have been retired alongside them.
What the pattern looks like. Enthusiasm, then simplification.
A feature appears, gets implemented widely, sometimes gets abused, then is eventually removed to simplify the results. Each withdrawal has been explained in similar terms.
What survives. The structural ones.
Features describing what something is have lasted better than features decorating how a result looks. Paths, products and organisations endure where stars, question lists and step displays have been restricted.
What that means for a business. Do not depend on one.
Any business whose visibility rests on a single enhancement is exposed to a decision it has no part in. Markup is worth doing because it describes your pages accurately, which nothing can withdraw.
How we keep this current. A named owner.
This page and the others describing display behaviour are reviewed quarterly by Andrew Odgers, Managing Director. It has already needed revising, which is why the commitment is stated rather than assumed.
Do not build on
a single
feature.
Any business whose visibility rests on one enhancement is exposed to a decision it has no part in. Several features have been added and withdrawn in recent years. Markup is worth doing because it describes your pages accurately, which nothing can withdraw.
On every page we build:
Nobody can promise you a panel, a snippet or a set of sitelinks. We will not pretend otherwise.
Every guide.
One practice.
What structured data is, which types apply to your business, how to test it, where the results features come from and what to do when nothing appears.
