We Analyzed Google’s Business & Marketing SERPs: What Actually Ranks in 2026?
We analyzed ten English-language Google searches across business and marketing topics to see what a modern search results page actually contains, which types of websites still win traditional organic rankings, and how often features such as AI Overviews, Reddit, video, and People Also Ask compete with the classic blue links.
The results make one thing clear: ranking first organically no longer means being the first thing a searcher sees. Only one of the ten SERPs in our sample began with a traditional organic result. AI Overviews appeared on every search, video appeared on nine, and Reddit earned a conventional organic ranking on eight.
At the same time, Google has not simply replaced websites with AI. Commercial brands still accounted for 43.4% of all traditional organic results in the dataset. But those brands captured just 20% of the number-one organic positions — suggesting that broad page-one visibility and winning the very top result are two different contests.
Methodology
Data source
Google SERP data was collected via the DataForSEO Google Organic Live Advanced endpoint on 7 August 2026. Searches were conducted for Canada, in English, from a desktop device running Windows. Search depth was set to ten, organic results were grouped, rectangle calculations were disabled, and asynchronous AI Overview loading was disabled.
Sample
We analyzed ten non-branded business and marketing queries:
how to start a business how to write a business plan how to market a small business digital marketing strategy how to advertise a business best marketing strategies how to get more customers email marketing social media marketing content marketing
The searches deliberately combine informational and commercially relevant topics rather than navigational brand searches.
Depth ten does not mean ten traditional organic listings were returned for every query. DataForSEO counts SERP elements such as AI Overviews, People Also Ask, videos, and discussion modules within the result sequence. Across the ten SERPs, the dataset therefore contained 76 traditional organic results.
For example, the search for how to start a business returned a traditional organic result first, People Also Ask second, and an AI Overview third before Google’s second conventional organic listing appeared.
Website types were classified manually into eight groups: commercial brands/platforms, government/public sector, education/training, forums/community, publishers/editorial sites, associations/nonprofits, video platforms, and reference/encyclopedia sites.
Finding 1: Organic position #1 was actually first only 10% of the time
The biggest change in organic search is visible before we even look at which domains ranked.
Only one of the ten SERPs began with a traditional organic result.
On the other nine searches, Google placed another search feature ahead of organic position #1. In most cases, that feature was an AI Overview.
The first conventional organic listing appeared at absolute SERP position two for six queries and position three for three queries.
| Query | Absolute position of organic #1 |
|---|---|
| how to start a business | 1 |
| how to write a business plan | 2 |
| how to market a small business | 2 |
| digital marketing strategy | 3 |
| how to advertise a business | 3 |
| best marketing strategies | 2 |
| how to get more customers | 3 |
| email marketing | 2 |
| social media marketing | 2 |
| content marketing | 2 |
This distinction matters. A company can accurately report that it ranks first organically while still appearing beneath an AI-generated response or another Google search feature.
For digital marketing strategy, for example, the first traditional organic result did not appear until the third SERP element. The same was true for how to advertise a business.
In other words, “we rank #1” and “we are the first result users see” are no longer interchangeable statements.
This is also why modern SEO reporting should measure the full search results page rather than treating ten blue links as the entire competitive landscape.
Finding 2: AI Overviews appeared on every SERP
AI Overviews were present on 10 out of 10 searches analyzed.
People Also Ask and Related Searches were equally universal. Video appeared on nine SERPs, while dedicated Discussions and Forums modules appeared on half.
| SERP feature | Searches containing feature | Share |
|---|---|---|
| AI Overview | 10 of 10 | 100% |
| People Also Ask | 10 of 10 | 100% |
| Related searches | 10 of 10 | 100% |
| Video | 9 of 10 | 90% |
| Discussions & Forums | 5 of 10 | 50% |
| Short videos | 1 of 10 | 10% |
For best marketing strategies, Google returned an AI Overview, traditional organic results, People Also Ask, video, a Discussions and Forums module, and related searches on the same results page.
The pattern also held for broad channel terms. email marketing returned AI Overview, organic, People Also Ask, video, and related searches. {.docx social media marketing additionally triggered a dedicated short-video feature.
One AI Overview — for how to start a business — was asynchronous. Because asynchronous AI Overview loading was intentionally disabled, DataForSEO detected its presence but did not retrieve its full citation set. The prevalence figure therefore remains 10 out of 10, while detailed citation analysis is available for nine of the ten searches.
The practical consequence is bigger than AI Overviews alone. All ten SERPs contained multiple layers of Google-controlled search functionality in addition to traditional websites.
Organic SEO still matters. But organic visibility is now competing inside a much more fragmented interface.
Finding 3: Commercial brands owned 43.4% of traditional organic results
Commercial brands and platforms were by far the largest website category in the conventional organic dataset.
They accounted for 33 of the 76 traditional organic rankings, or 43.4%.
Government and public-sector sites were second at 15.8%, followed by educational and training sites at 13.2%.
| Website type | Results | Share of organic results |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial brand / platform | 33 | 43.4% |
| Government / public sector | 12 | 15.8% |
| Education / training | 10 | 13.2% |
| Forum / community | 8 | 10.5% |
| Publisher / editorial | 7 | 9.2% |
| Association / nonprofit | 4 | 5.3% |
| Video platform | 1 | 1.3% |
| Reference / encyclopedia | 1 | 1.3% |
The commercial category includes companies such as Salesforce, Adobe, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Wix, Asana, Xero, Square, Chase, RBC, WordStream, LivePlan, RingCentral, and others.
That is an important counterpoint to the idea that informational search belongs primarily to publishers.
Companies are not merely ranking product and service pages. Large commercial brands are using educational content to compete directly for informational demand and occupy almost half of the traditional organic real estate in this sample.
But page-one presence did not translate proportionally into number-one rankings.
That is where the picture changes.
Finding 4: Brands dominated the page — but authoritative sources disproportionately won #1
Commercial brands represented 43.4% of all traditional organic listings, yet captured only two of the ten organic number-one positions.
Government/public-sector sources won three. Publishers and editorial sites also won three.
| Website type | #1 rankings | Share of #1 rankings | Share of all organic results |
|---|---|---|---|
| Government / public sector | 3 | 30% | 15.8% |
| Publisher / editorial | 3 | 30% | 9.2% |
| Commercial brand / platform | 2 | 20% | 43.4% |
| Forum / community | 1 | 10% | 10.5% |
| Education / training | 1 | 10% | 13.2% |
Publishers provide the clearest contrast.
They represented just 9.2% of the organic results overall but captured 30% of all number-one rankings.
Smart Insights ranked first for digital marketing strategy, Investopedia ranked first for social media marketing, and Content Marketing Institute ranked first for content marketing.
Government and public-sector sources showed a similar pattern. They made up 15.8% of the overall dataset but captured 30% of organic number-one rankings.
Commercial brands showed the opposite pattern: lots of visibility throughout the page, but relatively fewer outright wins.
The implication is not that Google “prefers publishers” or “prefers government websites.” Ten queries cannot establish that.
What the sample does show is a meaningful distinction between earning page-one distribution and earning the very top organic position. Commercial authority was enough to produce enormous visibility, while focused editorial and institutional authority performed disproportionately well at #1.
Finding 5: Reddit appeared on 80% of the searches — usually near the top
Reddit was the strongest individual community platform in the study.
It appeared as a conventional organic result for eight of the ten queries.
More importantly, those appearances were not concentrated near the bottom of the page.
Reddit reached the organic top three for six of the ten searches and held an average organic position of 2.63 across its eight appearances.
| Query | Reddit organic rank |
|---|---|
| how to market a small business | 1 |
| how to start a business | 2 |
| how to advertise a business | 2 |
| social media marketing | 2 |
| how to write a business plan | 3 |
| how to get more customers | 3 |
| best marketing strategies | 4 |
| email marketing | 4 |
Reddit appeared in 80% of the business and marketing SERPs analyzed and ranked in the organic top three for 60% of all searches.
Reddit also tied Salesforce as the single most frequently appearing domain in the traditional organic dataset, with eight rankings each.
The difference was position.
Salesforce’s eight appearances averaged organic position 4.0. Reddit’s averaged 2.63.
Community content was therefore not simply receiving broad visibility. In this sample, Reddit frequently outranked commercial publishers, SaaS brands, educational institutions, and professionally produced marketing resources.
Google also gave community discussion additional visibility outside the classic organic rankings. Dedicated Discussions and Forums modules appeared on five of the ten SERPs. For how to start a business, that module itself included Reddit alongside Facebook content.
That means a platform such as Reddit can potentially occupy the SERP through both a conventional organic result and Google’s dedicated community-content features.
Finding 6: Community content doubled its share inside the top three
The Reddit effect becomes even clearer when the full results are compared with only organic positions one through three.
Forums and community sites represented just 10.5% of all traditional organic results.
Among top-three rankings, their share rose to 20%.
| Website type | Top-three results | Share of top three | Share overall |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commercial brand / platform | 11 | 36.7% | 43.4% |
| Government / public sector | 7 | 23.3% | 15.8% |
| Forum / community | 6 | 20.0% | 10.5% |
| Publisher / editorial | 4 | 13.3% | 9.2% |
| Education / training | 2 | 6.7% | 13.2% |
Commercial brands remained the largest category in the top three at 36.7%, but their share declined relative to their 43.4% presence in the complete dataset.
Government sites moved the opposite direction, rising from 15.8% overall to 23.3% of top-three results.
Forums nearly doubled.
Taken together, government/public-sector sources and community content occupied 43.3% of all organic top-three positions in the sample.
For marketers, that creates an uncomfortable but useful reality: publishing another corporate explainer is not always competing only against other companies producing the same type of article.
It may be competing against government guidance on one side and an eight-year-old Reddit discussion on the other.
Finding 7: Video appeared on 90% of SERPs — but YouTube barely ranked organically
Video produced one of the clearest examples of why traditional rank tracking no longer describes the complete SERP.
Dedicated video results appeared on nine of the ten searches.
Yet YouTube accounted for only one of the 76 traditional organic listings.
That is just 1.3%.
| Measurement | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| SERPs containing a video feature | 9 of 10 | 90% |
| SERPs containing short videos | 1 of 10 | 10% |
| YouTube traditional organic listings | 1 of 76 | 1.3% |
This does not mean YouTube lacked visibility. It means Google primarily surfaced video through dedicated video interfaces rather than normal organic links.
The social media marketing SERP illustrates the fragmentation particularly well. It contained traditional organic listings, a standard video feature, and a separate short-video module containing both YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.
{.docx
For search marketers, the implication is straightforward.
Tracking only the ten conventional URLs leaves out an entire layer of visibility that may be available to the same brand through another format.
A company that ranks fifth organically and also appears in a video module may own more SERP real estate than the company sitting third with a single blue link.
Finding 8: A small group of domains repeatedly won across multiple queries
The 76 organic results were not evenly distributed across 76 different websites.
Several domains appeared repeatedly across the ten searches.
Reddit and Salesforce tied for the largest footprint at eight appearances each. Coursera and BDC followed at five each, with Adobe appearing three times.
| Domain | Organic appearances | Share of 10 SERPs |
|---|---|---|
| 8 | 80% | |
| Salesforce | 8 | 80% |
| Coursera | 5 | 50% |
| BDC | 5 | 50% |
| Adobe | 3 | 30% |
| Canada.ca | 2 | 20% |
| HubSpot | 2 | 20% |
| Investopedia | 2 | 20% |
| American Marketing Association | 2 | 20% |
| Forbes | 2 | 20% |
| Mailchimp | 2 | 20% |
BDC is particularly interesting in the Canadian dataset.
It appeared on half of the SERPs and averaged organic position 3.4 across those five rankings. It also appeared as an AI Overview source for how to write a business plan, alongside the Government of British Columbia. Coursera also appeared on half of the searches, with an average organic position of 4.8.
The recurring-domain pattern is another reason topical authority cannot be reduced to publishing a large number of articles. The strongest domains in this sample repeatedly competed across adjacent topics while coming from very different authority models: commercial software, government resources, formal education, and community discussion.
What did NOT dominate the results
Some of the most useful findings are the formats that were almost completely absent from conventional organic rankings.
Traditional business directories. Yelp-style and YellowPages-style directories accounted for none of the 76 organic results.
Ecommerce marketplaces. Amazon, Walmart, and similar transactional marketplaces also accounted for none.
That is partly a consequence of query selection: these searches revolve around business knowledge and marketing rather than product purchasing. The null result should therefore not be generalized to ecommerce SERPs.
Video platforms as blue links. YouTube captured only one conventional organic result despite dedicated video features appearing on 90% of the searches.
Reference sites. Wikipedia appeared just once, accounting for 1.3% of the organic dataset.
Traditional editorial publishers as a broad category. Publisher/editorial sites represented only 9.2% of all organic results, despite performing disproportionately well at number one.
That last distinction matters. Publishers were not broadly dominating the page. They were selectively winning the most valuable organic position.
What the data says about the modern Google SERP
The conventional framing of SEO still imagines a ranked list.
Position one. Position two. Position three.
The actual interface observed here is better understood as a collection of competing surfaces.
A query can trigger an AI Overview, People Also Ask, traditional organic links, discussion content, videos, short videos, and related-search functionality within the same result set.
The organic algorithm remains critical — 76 conventional results still appeared across the ten SERPs — but rank alone no longer describes total visibility.
That creates at least three separate questions for marketers:
Where does the website rank?
Which SERP features appear around that ranking?
Does the brand appear anywhere else inside those features?
An SEO strategy measuring only the first question is increasingly measuring only part of the search experience.
Limitations
This is a deliberately narrow study.
The sample contains ten English-language business and marketing searches on Google Canada, collected from a desktop device at a single point in time. Results should not be interpreted as representative of every Google search, country, device, industry, or query intent.
The keyword set is also heavily informational. Ecommerce, local-intent, news, entertainment, health, travel, and navigational searches can produce materially different SERPs.
DataForSEO search depth was set to ten SERP elements rather than ten traditional organic URLs. As a result, SERP features consumed some of those positions and the dataset contains 76 conventional organic results rather than 100. That limitation is also part of the finding: Google’s first ten result elements are no longer synonymous with ten organic websites.
Website-type classification required editorial judgement. Some organizations span more than one category — BDC, for example, combines institutional authority with extensive educational publishing — so the buckets are intended to describe the primary nature of each source rather than provide a universal taxonomy.
Google SERPs are dynamic. Rankings and feature availability may change by location, device, time, personalization, testing environment, or future algorithm updates.
Finally, the study measures what appeared, not why Google ranked it. The results establish distribution and visibility patterns, not causal ranking factors.
What businesses should actually do with this
Stop treating organic #1 as the entire goal. In this sample, the number-one organic result was actually Google’s first SERP element only 10% of the time.
Track AI visibility alongside traditional rankings. AI Overviews appeared on all ten queries analyzed.
Take Reddit and community visibility seriously. Reddit appeared organically on 80% of the SERPs and reached the top three on 60%.
Build genuine informational authority around your commercial brand. Commercial brands accounted for 43.4% of all conventional organic results. Companies clearly can compete for informational searches.
Do not assume another corporate blog is your only competitor. Government sources, educational institutions, publishers, and forums collectively occupied more than half of the organic dataset.
Think in formats, not just URLs. Video appeared on 90% of the searches despite YouTube almost never appearing as a conventional organic result.
Track the whole SERP. Organic position, AI Overview visibility, community results, video modules, and other search features should increasingly be evaluated together.
The ten-blue-link model of Google is not disappearing because organic results no longer matter. It is disappearing because organic results now compete inside a search interface with far more ways for Google to answer the query.
For businesses, that changes the objective from simply ranking a page to earning visibility wherever the search journey actually happens.
Van Isle SEO is a Canadian SEO consultancy specializing in organic search, GEO/AEO, local SEO, and technical SEO for service businesses.
Data collected 7 August 2026 via DataForSEO. Raw dataset and methodology available on request.
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Search results are no longer just ten blue links. AI Overviews, Reddit, video, People Also Ask, and other SERP features can all compete for the same visibility.