SERP (search engine results page)

Every search ends on a SERP: the search engine results page. For twenty years it meant ten blue links with a few ads around them. Today the same page holds an AI-written answer, boxes that answer the question outright, videos, maps and products, and the links come further down.

What is a SERP made of?

• Ads

  What it is

  Paid results, labelled as sponsored

  Who controls what it says

  The advertiser, within the engine's rules

• AI Overview

  What it is

  An AI-written answer with links to sources

  Who controls what it says

  The engine, from pages it retrieved

• Organic results

  What it is

  A title link, URL and snippet per page

  Who controls what it says

  The engine, from your page

• Features

  What it is

  Featured snippets, People also ask, video, images, local, shopping, knowledge panel

  Who controls what it says

  The engine, often from your page and structured data

Which parts appear depends on the query. A how-to question tends to bring an AI Overview and People also ask; a local service brings a map; a product name brings shopping results. See SERP features for each one.

Where does a search listing's text come from?

An organic result has two pieces of text, and neither is guaranteed to be what you wrote.

• The title link is usually built from the page's <title>, but Google may use a heading or other text when it judges that better.
• The snippet is, in Google's words, primarily created from the page content itself. Google sometimes uses the meta description when it describes the page more accurately, and cuts the snippet as needed to fit the device width.

Here is a real case from this site. Attensira records the title and description each of a workspace's own pages serves, and this page's history showed a title too long for most screens. The fix kept the term first and the brand last, taking the title from 69 characters to 56. Use the same order on your own pages, and keep the whole title near 60 characters.

How has the SERP changed?

More of it answers the question on the page. Google now puts an AI Overview above the links for many questions, and features such as featured snippets and People also ask answer others outright. When the answer sits on the results page, fewer searches go on to a website; zero-click search has the measured click rates with and without an AI summary.

Two consequences for anyone who depends on search:

1. Position is not the whole story. Ranking first below an AI Overview and a featured snippet is a different result from ranking first on a page of links.
2. The answer is a result too. Being the source an AI Overview cites, or the brand it names, is visibility, even when nobody clicks. See zero-click search.

What do people get wrong about SERPs?

• Judging from one screenshot. Results differ by location, device, language and time. One check is one observation.
• Writing the meta description as the snippet. It is a suggestion; the page content usually wins.
• Tracking rank only. A rank says nothing about what sits above it on the page.
• Forgetting the other engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude have no SERP at all, only answers, and they need to be read separately.

How does Attensira read the SERP?

Attensira reads Google's AI Overview the way a person sees it, on the consumer results page, since Google offers no API for it, and reads ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the same way; Claude, which has no consumer reader, is read through its API and labelled as such. Each answer is stored with its links, so you can see whether your page was the source and which page was chosen instead. The Google AI Overviews page covers how that engine is read.