In a recent study conducted by Ahrefs, it is revealed that the featured snippets affects the click on organic search results in a negative way. Ahrefs assessed nearly two million featured snippets and it found that the first organic results showed a massive drop in the click-through rate when the featured snippets are present.
The analysis on snippets also brought to the fore the fact that without the featured snippets, the first result page got nearly 26% CTR (click through rate). However, with the snippet, the CTR dropped to 19.6% and the feature snippet got a CTR of 8.6%. The CTR percentage is explained in the image below:
The study clearly indicated that when the featured snippets are presents it invariably resulted in lesser clicks over all for the organic search results.
Ahrets analyzed nearly 112 million keywords and here is what they found:
- More than 12% of the search queries have a featured snippet in the search results.
- Only about 30% of the featured snippets ranked at the top in the organic search results.
- A staggering 99.58% of the featured snippets are present in the top 10 positions in Google.
- A vast proportion of the featured snippets are trigged by the use of long-tail keywords.
- It is found that amongst the organic search results page, Wikipedia has the most amount of featured snippets.
- The featured snippets more often than not change sources.
