Google SERP Features in 2026: List, Benchmarks and Resource Library

Google SERP features are the result formats that appear alongside, above and below the standard organic listings: Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, Merchant Listings, image and video packs, local maps, Top Stories, AI Overviews and more. This page lists the features we track or have covered, shows how often the main ones appeared on US retail SERPs in GrowByData’s panel, and organizes our SERP feature guides by the job you’re doing.

Start Here: What Are You Trying To Do?

What Google SERP Features Are

A search engine results page (SERP) used to be ten ranked links. Now organic listings share the page with enhanced formats such as Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, image and video packs, shopping modules, local maps and AI-generated summaries. Where a brand appears across them, how often and in what context now matter alongside its position.

Google SERP Features At A Glance

Google doesn’t publish a fixed list of SERP features, and the set keeps changing. This table covers the features we track in GrowByData Compass or have written guides on, with how often each appeared on US retail SERPs in our panel.

SERP Features Resource Library

Everything we’ve published on Google SERP features, grouped by the job you’re doing. Posts in the last group cover features Google tested, so check the publish date before assuming one is live.

Optimize For A Specific Feature

• How to Rank in Google People Also Ask: 7 Steps: Seven steps to earn a People Also Ask spot.
• Google Featured Snippets: How to Rank and Get Clicks: Six steps to win Featured Snippets and clicks.
• Google Merchant Listings: How to Optimize: Nine steps to improve visibility in a top retail feature.
• Optimizing for 5 Top SERP Features: The five features worth optimizing for, and what the data says.
• How to Analyze Your SERP and Win the Video Gaps Competitors Miss: Find the video gaps on your keywords and win them.
• Short Videos in Google SERPs: How short videos reshape visual shopping results.
• What Marketers Need to Know About Things to Know: What the feature is and how to optimize for it.
• What People Are Saying: Social proof from Reddit, YouTube and more.
• Current Styles for Fashion Retailers: Trending products at the top of the page.
• People Also Shop For: Complementary items and what they offer brands.
• Editorial Reviews in Search Results: What the feature means for SEO and how to use it.
• Related Images: How the carousel affects engagement and visibility.
• Google’s Product Reviews Feature: What the feature means for businesses.

Track And Measure SERP Features

• How to Track SERP Features: A Step-by-Step Guide: Measure feature visibility, share of SERP and AI Overview citations.
• How to Find SERP Feature Opportunities: Find the feature gaps your competitors already use.
• Best SERP Feature Tracking Tools for Enterprise Teams: Tools compared on coverage, pricing and Shopping and AI gaps.
• SERP Monitoring vs Rank Tracking: Rank tracking shows position. Monitoring shows what users see.
• SERP Competitor Analysis: The 84% Your Rank Tracker Misses: Merchant Listings on 84.35% of retail SERPs, Featured Snippets on 0.63%.
• Google Share of Voice: Formula, Calculation and Benchmarks: Formulas and benchmarks across organic, paid and AI.
• Rank Tracker or Search Intelligence?: Twelve questions to decide what your team needs.
• The Importance of SERP Tracking: Why tracking matters as new features arrive.
• How Google’s /goto Redirect Rollout Affected Visibility Reporting: What broke in reporting when Google wrapped result links, and the fix.

Google AI Overviews And AI Mode

• Google AI Overviews: The New Front Page of Search: Where AI answers surface by industry and how to track them.
• How to Win Visibility in Google AI Overviews: Strategies for tracking and earning AI Overview citations.
• What Google I/O Signaled About Generative Search: How the generative rollout reshaped who gets cited.
• Tracking AI Overviews in Shopping and Product Searches: Track AI Overview presence on product searches.
• Ads in Google AI Overviews: Where ads appear in AI Overviews and why SERP tools miss them.
• Reddit Gets 7% of Retail AI Overview Citations: Reddit took 7.06% of 5.4M tracked retail citations.
• What Google AI Mode Changes for Brands: How AI Mode rebuilds the page around the answer.
• Top 10 Google AI Mode and AI Overviews Monitoring Tools: Ten tools compared on pricing and coverage, as of August 2026.
• Why Your Google AI Mode Traffic Isn’t Showing Up in GA4: GA4’s AI Assistants channel excludes AI Mode and AI Overviews.

Shopping, Ad And Sponsored Features

• Google Shopping Organic vs Paid: Tracking Both Surfaces: Most brands track only one of the two surfaces.
• Google’s “What Customers Love” AI Summaries in Search Ads: AI summaries in 8,777 of 1.2M mobile search ads we tracked.
• Google Ads “Strongest Match” Labels: Labels in 1.65% of 300,000+ mobile SERP scans in August.
• People Also Consider: A sponsored feature that inserts competitors.
• Two-Line Sponsored Ads: A two-line ad format Google experimented with.
• Amazon SERP Marketing Tactics on Google Shopping: Find feature and keyword opportunities in Amazon’s tactics.
• Understanding Amazon’s SERP Tactics: Three ways to win against Amazon’s SERP tactics.

New And Tested Features

• “Learn Something Specific”: Google’s AI Q&A in Business Profiles and local SEO.
• Image-Based Refinement Filters: A 2024 test of image-based filters with large icons.
• “Top Store Pages”: The test and what it offers retailers.
• Products From the Web: A test of a shopping feature.
• “More From the Web”: How it can affect brand visibility.

The Stats: Merchant Listings Appeared On 84.35% Of Retail SERPs

Source: GrowByData Retail Industry Panel. 85,465 SERP captures, United States, July 5 to August 4, 2026. Retail categories only; other industries differ.

How A Modern SERP Is Structured

Read a SERP as layers: organic listings, discovery features that expand or refine intent, commerce modules, local and contextual features, and AI-driven summaries. Several layers usually appear on the same page, so judge visibility as presence across the SERP, not one ranking position.

Core Organic And Discovery Features

Organic listings are still the foundation, but features surround them and often push them down the page. People Also Search and related searches point users toward adjacent topics. People Also Ask shapes what users expect even without clicks. Featured Snippets give a direct answer near the top, but they’re rare on retail searches: 0.63% of the retail SERPs in our panel. Knowledge Panels depend on consistent entity signals across the web, not on-page optimization alone.

Guides: People Also Ask | Featured Snippets

Commerce And Shopping SERP Features

Merchant Listings are enhanced product results that Google can show across several shopping surfaces, including popular product results. Google’s Search Console documentation treats them as a broader appearance, not a single module. GrowByData Compass reports the detected feature as Merchant Listings, and it appeared on 84.35% of the retail SERPs in our panel. Shopping results sit alongside them with paid and organic placements, and the two surfaces behave differently, so each needs its own tracking.

Guides: Optimizing for Merchant Listings | Google Shopping Organic vs Paid

Community, Experience And Perspective-Based Features

Discussions and forums, What People Are Saying and Perspectives surface peer insight and first-hand content, mostly on troubleshooting and opinion searches. Forums appeared on 9.11% of retail SERPs in our panel.

Local And Contextual SERP Features

Map results appear on location-driven searches, and visibility depends on relevance, proximity and prominence. Maps appeared on 50.61% of the retail SERPs in our panel. Top Stories favor freshness and may appear only briefly. Things to Know gives structured background on unfamiliar topics. See the Things to Know guide.

AI-Driven Search Experiences

AI Overviews generate synthesized summaries from multiple sources. They can cut immediate clicks and raise the value of being cited, which is why many teams now separate SEO from AEO and GEO, as we break down in AEO vs GEO vs SEO. AI Mode is different. It’s a separate AI-first search experience built around conversational exploration, and it sits outside the classic SERP, though it signals the same shift toward AI-native discovery.

Guides: Google AI Overviews | Google AI Mode

What 85,465 Retail SERPs Tell Us

Rank tracking reads the organic surface, on nearly every page, and misses the Merchant Listings and AI Overview surfaces on most of them. And a feature on about one page in 160, like Featured Snippets on retail, is a poor target for a commercial content program. Read the full study: SERP competitor analysis.

How SERP Features Change SEO Measurement

Rankings and clicks tell only part of the story. Measurement also has to cover presence across SERP features, visibility above and below the fold, inclusion in AI-generated summaries, and competitive share of voice. Our guides on SERP monitoring vs rank tracking and Google share of voice cover how to set that up.

Monitoring SERP Features At Scale

SERP layouts change continuously and vary by query, device and geography, so manual spot-checks and rank-only reports can’t show real visibility.

Effective SERP monitoring takes a feature-level view: which features appear for each query, where brands show up inside them, and how competitors occupy SERP space over time. As AI surfaces grow, it overlaps with AI visibility analysis, since being cited or left out of an AI summary is now part of the same measurement problem.

GrowByData Compass tracks SERP features, Google Shopping, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode for your tracked keywords as part of our search intelligence software. To build the process yourself first, start with how to track SERP features.

Last Updated: October 2026

Google SERP Features FAQ

What Is A Whole-SERP SEO Strategy?

A whole-SERP SEO strategy aims to maximize a brand’s visibility across the entire results page, not just its organic rankings. Instead of judging success by position alone, it looks at where and how a brand appears across SERP features such as People Also Ask, Featured Snippets, shopping modules, local results, community features and AI-generated summaries.

Which SERP Features Appear Most Often On Retail Searches?

In the GrowByData Retail Industry Panel, based on 85,465 US retail SERP captures from July 5 to August 4, 2026, organic results appeared on 99.99% of pages, People Also Search on 99.67%, Merchant Listings on 84.35%, refinement filters on 81.09%, AI Overviews on 75.31% and People Also Ask on 71.60%. Featured Snippets appeared on 0.63%. These figures are retail only and other industries differ.

How Do SERP Features Affect Website Visibility And Traffic?

Some features reduce direct clicks, but they often raise brand exposure and early-stage discovery. Visibility inside a feature shapes how users see a brand even when no click follows.

How Can Brands Optimize Content To Appear In SERP Features?

Answer common questions clearly, structure content so it’s easy to scan, match the format to the intent, and show expertise. Optimizing for one feature in isolation rarely works, so align content with user intent. Learn more in Optimizing for 5 top SERP features.

See Which SERP Features Your Competitors Own

If you want to see which SERP features appear on your keywords across your chosen markets and devices, and who occupies them, book a demo or an audit of your current SERP coverage.

Talk To An Expert

Related GrowByData Resources

• SERP Tracking
• Google AI Overviews Monitoring
• Google AI Mode Monitoring