After an intense period of testing on the US market, Google rolled out the
Visual Stories
unit for all its users. Visual Stories is a type of search result that may appear only on Mobile devices and consists of a collection of 2, 3, or 4 Web Stories that blend video, audio, images, animation, and text that Google algorithmically selects to show to its users.
It can only appear on the first page of search results and can be positioned toward the top, middle, or bottom of the page.
Due to its format and placement on the SERP, the Visual Stories unit has the ability to occupy a lot of space on Mobile devices and SEOs should pay attention to it. For this reason, Visual Stories is now one of the types of results that can be monitored with AWR.
The positions of Visual Stories are being reported when tracking the
Universal version
of the Google Mobile
search engine. To see which keywords triggered the Visual Stories feature, just go to Ranking -> Keywords report and apply the
Web Stories
filter as shown in the screenshot below:
As for the other type of SERP Features, if the selected website achieved a position in the Visual Stories unit for a particular keyword its associated icon will be colored in green. Otherwise, the icon will remain blue.
All the links within the Visual Stories unit will be reported with the same position value, being displayed in the Top Sites report starting from left to right of the unit:
