The blue link is dying. Slowly, but unmistakably. On any high-volume informational query in 2026, the standard ten blue links sit underneath a mix of AI Overviews, featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, knowledge panels, and various other features that occupy the real estate above the fold. The user who only scrolls to the first ten results is becoming rare.

This post is a tour of the SERP features that matter in 2026, how each one works, and what it takes to win them.

The feature landscape

A rough map of what shows up on modern search results, in descending order of prominence:

AI Overviews. Google’s generated answer at the very top of the page. Powered by Gemini. Pulls from a handful of sources and cites them inline. The newest feature and the most important one on queries where it appears.

Featured snippets. The boxed answer Google has been showing since 2014. Pulls directly from a single page. Sits just below AI Overviews when both appear, above the regular results when only the snippet appears.

Knowledge panels. The right-rail box for entities — people, companies, places, products, concepts. Sourced from Google’s knowledge graph, which is built from Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Google’s own entity extraction.

People Also Ask. The expandable box of related questions Google thinks the user might also be asking. Each question expands into an answer pulled from a specific page. Appears on the majority of informational queries.

Image packs. A horizontal row of image results embedded in the regular SERP. Common on queries with visual intent.

Video carousels. A row of video results, usually from YouTube. Common on how-to queries.

Local packs. The map plus three business listings for local-intent queries.

Shopping results. Product listings with prices, shown for commercial queries.

Twitter/X carousels. Recent posts from X on trending or news queries.

News top stories. Three to five recent news articles on news-intent queries.

Owning any one of these features is valuable. Owning several for the same query is transformative. A page that wins the AI Overview citation, the featured snippet, and two People Also Ask slots has saturated the above-the-fold for that query.

AI Overviews

AI Overviews are the most important feature to target in 2026, and the one most SEO advice hasn’t caught up to.

When Google shows an AI Overview, it generates a paragraph answer based on 3 to 8 source pages it considers authoritative for the query. The cited sources show up as small clickable links next to the generated text. Clicks to those sources are way down from what position-one blue link clicks used to look like, but the brand exposure from being cited still matters.

To win AI Overview citations, the content on your page needs to look like a citation-worthy source to Gemini’s grounding system. The signals that help:

Clear question-answer structure. The same structure that wins featured snippets wins AI Overview citations. H2 phrased as the question. Direct answer in the first paragraph after. Expanded context after that.

Authoritative, factual writing. Hedging, padding, and marketing language reduce the odds of being picked. Direct, specific claims with numbers and citations increase them.

Topical depth. Pages that cover a topic comprehensively — not just the headline question but the related sub-questions the user might ask next — get cited more often than thin pages that only answer the narrow query.

Strong off-site signals. Brand authority, backlinks, and mentions in other authoritative sources still matter. Gemini’s grounding leans on traditional trust signals alongside the content itself.

This is the same work that wins AEO citations in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Do it once, win across platforms.

The mechanics of featured snippets are covered in depth elsewhere in the blog. The short version: phrase an H2 as the question the user typed, follow it immediately with a 40 to 60 word direct answer, and use clean list or table markup when the query calls for it.

In 2026 the main tactical shift is that snippets are now evaluated alongside AI Overviews. On queries where both appear, the snippet is sometimes redundant — Google shows the overview and doesn’t bother with the snippet. On queries where the overview doesn’t trigger, the snippet still does. Optimizing for both at once is the right move because the same structural work helps both.

People Also Ask

PAA is the most under-optimized feature on the SERP. The bar to get into a PAA box is lower than the bar to win a featured snippet, the opportunities per query are plural (each query has 4 to 8 PAA questions), and the click-through rate when users expand a PAA and click the source is real.

To win PAA slots:

Study the PAA questions that appear for your target queries. They’re visible in any rank tracker that supports SERP feature tracking. They’re also visible just by running the query and looking at the page.

Create a dedicated H2 on your page for each PAA question, phrased as close to the PAA wording as possible. “How much does X cost” not “Pricing considerations for X.”

Answer each question in 50 to 100 words directly under the H2, in the same direct-answer format you’d use for a featured snippet.

This tactic can get a single page into three or four PAA slots for different variations of the same query. That’s three or four additional touchpoints on the SERP for the same piece of content.

Knowledge panels

Knowledge panels are the right-rail boxes that show up when you search for an entity — a company, a person, a product, a place. They’re sourced from Google’s knowledge graph, which is built from a mix of Wikipedia, Wikidata, structured data on websites, and Google’s own entity extraction from the web.

For a business, the goal is usually to trigger a knowledge panel for the company name and for the founder’s name. The work to make that happen is a separate topic covered in more depth in the Knowledge Panel post in this blog, but the short version is: establish the entity in as many authoritative sources as possible, use consistent naming and structured data, and be patient — panels can take months or years to appear.

The AEO dividend from a knowledge panel is significant. When Google recognizes your brand as an entity, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity all get better at citing you correctly. The knowledge panel is the most visible sign of entity recognition, but the underlying recognition matters more than the panel itself.

Image packs and video carousels

For queries with visual or video intent — “how to tie a bowline,” “what does pancreatic cancer look like on a CT scan,” “best hairstyles for oval face” — the above-the-fold results are often dominated by image packs and video carousels rather than regular blue links.

Winning image packs means publishing images on your site with descriptive alt text, high resolution, and clear file names. Schema markup helps. So does hosting the image on a page that also ranks well for the query.

Winning video carousels means publishing video content on YouTube. The videos that show up in Google’s carousels are almost entirely YouTube videos because YouTube is Google. Publishing on other video platforms is fine for other reasons but doesn’t help here.

For content marketers, the honest trade-off is that winning image packs and video carousels requires producing images and videos, which is a different skill set than writing. Teams that are strong at writing and weak at multimedia usually don’t prioritize these features, and that’s fine. They’re not the most valuable features for most B2B or text-heavy categories.

Local packs

For any query with local intent — “dentist near me,” “plumber in Austin,” “pizza delivery” — the local pack dominates the SERP. Three businesses, a map, and a link to more results. Winning the local pack is a local SEO discipline of its own, separate from the rest of the SERP feature work.

The high-leverage moves for local pack visibility: claim and fully complete your Google Business Profile, collect reviews consistently (especially in the specific language users use to describe your service), maintain NAP consistency across directories, and publish location-specific content on your site.

What to prioritize

If you’re just starting to work on SERP features, prioritize in this order:

  1. Featured snippets and People Also Ask on your top 50 target queries. Same structural work wins both and carries over into AI Overviews.
  2. AI Overview citations on informational queries. Build topical depth on the topics that matter for your business.
  3. Knowledge panel work on your brand and founder. Long payoff but compounding value.
  4. Image and video features only if they’re strongly represented in your category.
  5. Local pack only if you have a local business.

Do the first one well and the rest follow naturally. SERP feature optimization is not a separate discipline from content quality — it’s what content quality looks like when the content is also formatted to be extracted by machines.