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

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%

Nine of nineteen SERP features declined in appearance. While some of these declines were negligible, several showed substantial drops in visibility:

Shopping, Featured Snippet, Paid Sitelink, and Paid SERP features saw the greatest relative decline. Of these, Featured snippet is the most significant, appearing on 5.53% of SERPs in June, down from 15.41% in January:

SERP feature	Current SERP visibility (June 2025)	Previous SERP visibility (January 2025)	Relative change since January 2025
shopping	0.99%	3.14%	-68%
snippet	5.53%	15.41%	-64%
paid_sitelink	0.66%	1.48%	-55%
paid	0.91%	1.95%	-53%
local_teaser	1.96%	2.55%	-23%
local_pack	2.96%	3.48%	-15%
knowledge_panel	12.95%	14.09%	-8%
organic_shopping	10.40%	11.24%	-7%
news	14.20%	14.94%	-5%

The decline in Featured snippets correlates very strongly (0.9) with the growth in AI Overviews (but as always, correlation is not causation):

SERP Feature	Correlation with AI Overview Growth
snippet	-0.9053
local_teaser	-0.8571
shopping	-0.7512
local_pack	-0.7438
paid	-0.699
paid_sitelink	-0.6803
knowledge_panel	0.7886

In fact, plotting the visibility of both SERP features on the same graph shows a very clear “switch over” point in March. We noted that March saw AI overviews grow by 116%, and it seems that Featured snippets saw a corresponding decline in visibility at the same time:

Six of fifteen SERP features appear more often. Knowledge cards increased by 54%, while AI Overviews (and the related AI Overviews Sitelinks SERP feature) experienced huge growth between January and June, increasing by 598% and 541% respectively.

But, surprisingly, they weren’t the biggest winners.

Sitelinks increased by 906% between January and June 2025, appearing on 84.95% of SERPs, up from 8.44%:

SERP Feature	Current SERP visibility (June 2025)	Previous SERP visibility (January 2025)	Relative change since January 2025
sitelink	84.95%	8.44%	906%
ai_overview	27.43%	3.93%	598%
ai_overview_sitelink	25.00%	3.90%	541%
knowledge_card	2.30%	1.50%	54%
question	79.13%	73.73%	7%
discussion	20.26%	19.49%	4%

Looking closer, Sitelinks saw a huge spike in appearance around the time of Google’s March Core update, mainly affecting non-branded keywords:

Our data scientist, Xibeijia, hypothesizes that before March, most sitelinks were Internal Sitelinks, which usually only appear on brand keywords. After March, we see more 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.

Post byRyan Law

Ryan Law is the Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs. Before joining the team, Ryan was CMO at content marketing agency Animalz.

Over the past 13 years, Ryan has been a writer, content strategist, team lead, marketing director, VP, CMO, and agency co-founder. He's worked with companies including Google, Zapier, Textio, Clearbit, and Algolia and hosted workshops and webinars for many more.

Ryan is the creator of two fantasy novels, two writing courses, and many more (less successful) projects.

Contributors

Xibeijia Guan