Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

The search engine results page is what a search engine returns for a query. The abbreviation has survived a considerable change in what the thing actually is: for most commercial queries it is no longer a list of ten links but a stack of blocks — ads, a generated answer, an extracted snippet, an entity panel, a local pack, videos, related questions — with the ordinary results distributed among them. The first consequence is that rank and position on the screen have come apart. Being third in the organic list says nothing about where the third result sits once the blocks above it are counted, and it says nothing about how much of the visible page is left by the time a reader reaches it. Two queries at the same reported rank can have completely different amounts of attention available. The second is that there is no single results page to be measured against. Layout varies by device, location, language, signed-in history and time of day, and blocks appear and disappear as the engine's confidence in the query changes. A tracked rank is an average over many different pages, which is fine as a trend and misleading as a fact about any one search. The most useful thing you can do with a results page is read it before writing anything. It is the engine stating what it currently believes the query means: whether the intent is to learn, to compare, to buy or to navigate; what format it rewards; which competitors it considers relevant; whether it thinks the question can be answered without a click at all. That is a stronger brief than any keyword volume figure. It is also where you find out that a query is not worth pursuing. A page dominated by an answer block, an entity panel and four ads is telling you plainly that there is little room left, and the honest response is to spend the effort on a query where the page still has space for a result someone will open.