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Goodbye, Featured Snippets: How SERP Features Have Evolved in the AI Era

Goodbye, Featured Snippets: How SERP Features Have Evolved in the AI Era

We analyzed 1,000,000 SERPs to see how the presence of different SERP features has changed since the start of the year.

AI Overviews appeared from nowhere in August 2024, and now appear on over a quarter of the keywords in this sample (and they’re much more prevalent for informational keywords).

Functionally, AI Overviews seem to overlap with existing SERP features, especially Featured snippets. This is corroborated by our early research that found that AI Overviews and Featured snippets commonly appeared alongside one another.

So I wanted to know: are AI Overviews replacing existing SERP features? As AI gets incorporated throughout the search experience, which SERP features are growing in prominence, and which can we stop caring about?

Trend lines for major SERP features since December 2023.

We analyzed the presence of 15 different SERP features across 1,000,000 randomly chosen US Desktop SERPs from our Keywords Explorer database.

We compared the presence of each SERP feature between January and June 2025. Here’s how it looks:

Sidenote.

Not all SERP features were included in this analysis.

And here’s how the relative visibility of each SERP feature has changed since the start of this year, January 2025:

And here’s the data:

SERP feature Current SERP visibility (June 2025) Previous SERP visibility (January 2025) Relative change since January 2025
sitelink 84.95% 8.44% 906%
question 79.13% 73.73% 7%
ai_overview 27.43% 3.93% 598%
ai_overview_sitelink 25.00% 3.90% 541%
discussion 20.26% 19.49% 4%
news 14.20% 14.94% -5%
knowledge_panel 12.95% 14.09% -8%
organic_shopping 10.40% 11.24% -7%
snippet 5.53% 15.41% -64%
local_pack 2.96% 3.48% -15%
knowledge_card 2.30% 1.50% 54%
local_teaser 1.96% 2.55% -23%
shopping 0.99% 3.14% -68%
paid 0.91% 1.95% -53%
paid_sitelink 0.66% 1.48% -55%
March saw AI overviews grow by 116%, and it seems that Featured snippets saw a corresponding decline in visibility at the same time:

Scroll-to Sitelinks (as reported by Brodie Clark), which can appear for both branded and non-branded queries.

How to analyze your SERP features in Ahrefs

You can find all of this SERP feature data in Ahrefs. Just head to Site Explorer, enter your domain, and click the Organic keywords report. From there, you can filter your keyword rankings to see where different SERP features appear:

When I filter the organic keywords for ahrefs.com to show AI Overviews, I can find almost 67,000 keywords that we rank for, and trigger an AI Overview:

Final thoughts

It seems very likely that AI Overviews have superseded Featured snippets. They serve similar functions—encouraging zero-click searches, and resolving the searcher’s intent directly in the SERP—and the growth in AI Overviews is matched by a decline in Featured snippets.

As far as SERP features go, AI Overviews are uniquely flexible, able to accommodate a vast number of different search intents. My hunch is that AI Overviews may be able to replace other SERP features, so I’ll keep checking to see if other declining SERP features continue their trend over the next few months.

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