A SERP (search engine results page) is the page a search engine shows after someone enters a query. It can include organic results, paid ads, and special features such as featured snippets or local map results. The search engine builds each SERP for that query at that moment. SEO teams collect SERPs to track rankings and study competitors.

SERPs are personalized and geo-targeted, so the same query returns different results depending on the searcher's location, search history, and device. Accurate SERP tracking therefore means querying from the specific city or country being measured, since results seen from a single IP location can't represent results across dozens of target markets.

Featured snippets, local packs, and other SERP features complicate scraping further, since the exact markup and position of these elements can shift between requests even for the identical query.

SERP data is the raw material rank tracking is built on: a rank tracker is essentially a scheduled job that scrapes a SERP for a given keyword and location, then records where a target result lands.

Organic vs. Paid Results

  • Organic results: Pages the search engine selects from its index. Google states that it does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher.
  • Paid results: Ads won through an auction. Google Ads uses Ad Rank, which considers the bid, ad and landing page quality, and the context of the search, to decide whether an ad shows and where.
  • Placement: Google's top ads generally appear above the top organic results, but they may show below them on some queries.

How a Search Engine Builds a SERP

Google describes three stages: crawling pages, indexing their content, and serving results when someone searches. To order the results, it weighs the meaning of the query, the relevance and quality of each page, and how usable the page is. The weight of each factor depends on the query. For example, fresh content matters more for current news than for dictionary definitions.