SERP features: what's left to win

"SERP features" is third-party vocabulary. Google's own documentation says rich results, visual elements and search features, and its Visual Elements Gallery names things narrowly — text result, rich result, image result, video result, sitelinks group, related searches group, related questions group. Worth knowing the official names before you go read the docs.

The useful question isn't how many features exist. It's which ones you can do anything about — a shorter list than most SEO advice implies, and it just got shorter again.

The features, and what actually triggers each one

The honest split is between features you make yourself eligible for and features Google awards you.

Two rows do most of the work. Rich results are the only place markup is a hard requirement; local results are the only place a single free tool — a Google Business Profile — reliably produces a visible feature.

Structured data: eligibility, not a lever

Google documents roughly two dozen structured data types that can produce a rich result — Article, Breadcrumb, Event, Job posting, Local business, Product, Recipe, Review snippet and Video among them, alongside narrower ones like Math solver and Dataset.

The mistake almost everyone makes is treating that list as a menu. Most of it doesn't apply to most sites. Marking a services page up as a Product because Product gets stars is markup that lies about the page, and the fastest way to get rich results suppressed sitewide.

Implement the types that describe what the page genuinely is: Organization, Breadcrumb, Article, Local business where you have a location, Product or Service where you sell one, Review snippet only where real reviews exist. Fuller treatment in schema markup for AI search.

Featured snippets: you can only opt out

This is the clearest statement in Google's documentation and the most widely ignored. On how to get one, Google says: "You can't. Google systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet for a user's search request, and if so, elevates it."

No markup, meta tag or format requests one. The controls run only the other way: nosnippet blocks all snippets on a page, data-nosnippet excludes a passage, and a low max-snippet can suppress featured snippets — though Google notes even that "doesn't guarantee" it.

That leaves one real strategy, and it's the same one that works for AI answer engines: write the direct answer as a short, self-contained passage near the top of a page that already ranks. You're not requesting the feature. You're making extraction easy if it happens.

What just died, and what it tells you

The most useful thing about SERP features right now is watching which ones Google removes.

HowTo rich results were announced as going away in Google's August 2023 post, "Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results," and they're gone.

FAQ rich results now carry a deprecation notice in Google's own FAQPage documentation: "As of May 7, 2026, FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search. We will be dropping the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and support in the Rich results test in June 2026." Search Console API support follows by August 2026.

Both were among the most-implemented schema types on the web, precisely because they were the easiest way to take up more vertical space. Google removed them anyway. The pattern holds: features that mostly gave publishers real estate get retired; features that serve the person searching survive.

The second-order lesson matters more. FAQPage markup is still valid schema.org vocabulary, and it still partitions a page into discrete, labeled question-and-answer units — exactly the granularity an answer engine wants to lift. Keep writing real FAQ sections. Stop justifying them with a snippet that no longer exists.

The click math underneath all of this

Features are worth chasing in proportion to the clicks they produce, and that ratio moved.

Pew Research Center analyzed the browsing data of 900 US adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025. In the 12,593 searches that produced an AI summary, users clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits. Without an AI summary, they clicked on 15% — nearly twice as often. Clicks on a link inside the AI summary itself happened on 1% of visits. Users ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, versus 16% of pages with only traditional results.

That is one study of one month, and it measures behavior rather than your traffic. But the direction is unambiguous, and it reframes the exercise: a feature sitting above a result that now gets clicked half as often is a smaller prize than it was. Google's own guidance is that "there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary" — a page has to be indexed and snippet-eligible, and that's it. More in how to rank in AI Overviews.

What to actually do

• Fix eligibility first. Indexable, fast, snippet-permitted. Nothing else matters if a page can't be retrieved.
• Mark up what the page truly is. Three accurate types beat twelve aspirational ones.
• Claim and maintain the Google Business Profile if you have a location. Free, and the highest-yield feature a local business can get.
• Write answer-first passages for the questions you want to own. One piece of work serves snippets, AI Overviews and external answer engines.
• Stop reporting features as the outcome. A feature you won that sent nobody is a vanity metric.

Frequently asked questions

Can you force Google to show a featured snippet for your page?

No. Google's documentation answers this directly and says the systems decide whether a page would make a good featured snippet and elevate it accordingly. There is no markup, meta tag, or formatting convention that requests one. The controls only run the other way: nosnippet prevents snippets on a page, data-nosnippet excludes a specific passage, and a low max-snippet value can suppress featured snippets — though Google warns that even this is not a guarantee. The practical approach is to write a short, self-contained answer near the top of a page that already ranks well.

Is FAQ schema still worth adding in 2026?

Yes, but not for a rich result. Google's own FAQPage documentation states that FAQ rich results stopped appearing on May 7, 2026, with the search appearance, rich result report and Rich Results Test support dropped in June 2026. The markup remains valid schema.org vocabulary and continues to do something useful: it divides a page into discrete, labeled question-and-answer units, which is the shape AI answer engines prefer when extracting content. Add it where you have genuine FAQ sections, don't add it to pages that don't, and don't promise anyone a snippet.

Does structured data improve your rankings?

Not directly. Structured data makes a page eligible for specific rich result types and helps machines resolve what the page and business are, but it isn't a ranking factor in the way content quality and links are. A page with perfect markup that nobody links to and nothing distinguishes will not rank because of the markup. What structured data does reliably is remove ambiguity: it states your entity, your prices, your hours or your author explicitly rather than leaving them to be inferred from prose, which matters increasingly for AI systems that need to resolve facts quickly.

Which SERP features matter most for a small local business?

Local results, by a wide margin. A complete and actively maintained Google Business Profile — correct categories, hours, service area, photos and a steady flow of genuine reviews — is free and produces the most visible feature available to a business with a physical location or service area. After that, review snippets where you have real reviews to mark up, and sitelinks, which follow from a clear site structure rather than any markup. Chasing recipe cards, math solvers or job posting results when none of them describe your business is wasted effort.

Why does Google keep removing SERP features?

The removals share a pattern: features that primarily gave publishers more vertical space in the results tend to get retired, while features that help the person searching survive. HowTo and FAQ rich results were among the most widely implemented structured data types precisely because they expanded a listing, and both are now gone. The practical lesson is not to build a content strategy on any single feature. Build it on answering questions well, in a format that extracts cleanly, and treat whichever feature currently displays that answer as a rendering detail that will change.