Ahrefs study shows featured snippets steal the traffic from top organic search results

According to the study carried out by Ahrefs, if a featured snippet is present in Google search results for a search query, the clicks on the first organic search result fell down by 20 percent. The study shows an overall negative impact of featured snippets on the traffic to organic search results.

The study was carried out for 2 million featured snippets, which found that without featured snippet the click through rate for the first organic search result was 26 percent, and with featured snippet the click through rate fell down to 19.6 percent. Featured snippets received around 8.6 percent click through rate.

Ahrefs analysed 112 million search queries and found featured snippets in 12.29 percent of them. In 30.9 percent of the cases, the featured snippets appeared on the top of organic search results. Featured snippets appeared in top ten results for 99.58 percent of the search queries. Majority of featured snippets appeared for long trail search queries, and most of them were from Wikipedia. Featured snippets often change sources for the same keyword.

I did a brief analysis of the study carried out by Ahrefs. Please click here for the detailed study carried out by Ahrefs.