How SEO is changing and what it means for your website

What is a SERP feature? In short, it’s anything on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that isn’t the standard blue link. Previously these links were front and centre, but now there are a variety of features on results pages that can divert a user’s attention – some of which your business can take advantage of by having a Google Business Profile.

Check out Backlinko’s guide to SERP features, if you want to learn more about all the features Google currently uses.

SEO isn’t just about how you rank, but also how people interact with search results in general. Much of this comes down to the way Google, and other search engines, use SERP features to influence user behaviour.

A recent State of Search report by Datos suggests that up to 26% of searches in the EU and UK ended with no clicks at all. This is called ‘zero-click’ behaviour and generally stems from a user finding their answers within the Search Results Page – whether that be due to an AI Overview (AIO), or a local pack (where location-specific results related to a query are displayed).

AI has grown exponentially over the last few years, and Google are no strangers to the concept – they have been using AI to improve the search experience as far back as 2001. However Generative AI, like ChatGPT, presents new competition and a new opportunity for them.

AIO is one of the biggest drivers behind zero-click searches in 2025. If you haven’t come across it in your own Googling, it’s a summary at the top of SERPs which collates answers from some of the many websites available in Google’s index – if your site is ranking, it could be contributing to these summaries.

AIOs come with positives and negatives, the biggest negative being a decreased click-through-rate on your informational keywords, and the positives being a potentially increased visibility of your message and content.

Many keyword tools now offer the ability to track your presence in AIO, and we recommend investing some time experimenting with these if you are seeing decreased organic traffic – particularly since April 2024, when it first rolled out.

There is no one trick to getting featured in AIO, or at least not yet, but we’ve found that many key SEO principles for ranking well overlap – having well structured, targeted, and straightforward content that answers user-queries directly is most important.