A SERP, or search engine results page, is the page a search engine displays after someone runs a query, made up of organic listings plus features like ads, the local pack, and featured snippets. Businesses track their SERP presence to see whether they show up where potential customers are actually looking.
What appears on a SERP shapes how much traffic a business gets before a single click happens. A page ranking first for a keyword can still lose visibility if a competitor’s featured snippet or a Google Business Profile map pack sits above it. Understanding the layout of the page you’re trying to rank on matters as much as the ranking position itself. For the step-by-step process of improving your position on these pages, see how Google ranks websites.
Key takeaway
A SERP is not just a list of ten blue links. It’s a mix of organic results and features that compete for the same clicks, and ranking well means understanding both.
How a SERP is built
Google builds a SERP by matching a query to its index, then ranking and arranging results using hundreds of signals, including relevance, page authority, page experience, and search intent.
The process starts with crawling and indexing, covered in more detail on the web crawlers glossary page. Once a page is indexed, Google decides which queries it’s eligible to rank for, then arranges the SERP layout based on the type of query. A local query like
