What Is a SERP?
A SERP, short for search engine results page, is what you see after you run a search: the list of links, along with anything else the engine decides to show above or beside them, like ads, a featured snippet, or a knowledge panel. What a SERP looks like has changed more in the last two years than in the previous decade, mostly because of AI generated answers now sitting at the top of it.
What used to be on it
For most of Google's history, a SERP was ads at the top, then ten blue links, sometimes with a featured snippet or a knowledge panel mixed in.
What is on it now
- An AI Overview, a generated summary pulling from several sources, often shown before any normal result
- A shrinking number of traditional links below that summary
- Other AI tools, like ChatGPT or Perplexity, that skip the results page format entirely and just answer in a conversation
Why this matters for how you measure success
A high ranking on a traditional SERP used to be the whole game. Now, being named inside the AI generated summary at the top, or inside a chat answer that has no SERP at all, matters just as much, sometimes more, since a lot of people never scroll past it.
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