Rich answers keep on growing on Google

Just yesterday, reporting fragments of Rand Fishkin’s intervention on Google’s evolution, we talked about the increasing intrusiveness of the search engine and the neverending growth of zero click researches: here now comes a new statistical study to confirm the boom of the rich answers, as of all those Google’s SERPs features that are now joining the classic blue links among search results.

Perficient Digital’s study on rich answers

Providing these data is the annual report by Perficient Digital, that analyzed 1.4 million search queries in order to test on featured snippets and other rich answers, try and understand how Google takes and produces these results and how or how much they changed over time. The most blatant aspect is the significant growth of carousels, especially those with images, that is pulling the entire increasing of these features.

A proper boom for carousels on SERPs

Looking at the analysis in further detail, we find out that this year’s presence of rich answers on Google for mobile research results is more than doubled (picture above, taken from the study as any other on this article). This increase results, as mentioned, from the carousel’s spike, moved from 500k on 2018 to almost reach a million occurrences today; notably, image carousels have grown of the 151% per year.

A quick progression for images

A news that maybe will not surprise that much, especially if we think that multiple times over the current year Google (even at Google I/O) stated the intention to show more images on search result pages, inviting sites to focus on the