Google's Search Snippets Go Longer:
What We Found Out Researching 1M Snippets

Let's compare the snippet of the same page shown for the same query before and after this Google update. Let's type some query into the search bar to see how snippets used to look like and how they are displayed now. All Star Wars fans are eagerly waiting for Episode 8 –The Last Jedi to hit the big screen, thus I decided to search for "Star Wars."

Using Serpstat's "Top by Keyword" tool I found how the SERP looked like before this update. The second organic result on September 12 was Wikipedia, let's take a closer look at its snippet. As you can see the snippet's length was 165 characters.

Now let's search for the same query to see what has changed. Without even counting the characters, it's easy to see that the snippet length increased dramatically. Instead of regular 2 lines, there are 4 now. Let's now count the number of characters: 325 characters are shown in the snippet.

We took 10 000 HV eCommerce keywords from our US database and analyzed their top-100 search results. Thus, we got 1 000 000 snippets to analyze. Here's the histogram we created based on the snippet's length distribution:

Have you noticed how similar this graph resembles two top New York City sights? Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building!


As you see, the graph we got is quite interesting as it's bimodal distribution, let's call it "twin peaks distribution graph." Thus there's no sense to count the average snippet length for this kind of distribution. The classic approach to an analysis of bimodal distribution is to represent them as a mixture of two normal distributions.

I also want to share the snippet with the maximum length, which is 345 characters!

Despite the fact that descriptions aren't a ranking factor and making your descriptions longer won't affect your site's ranking, you can still profit from this.The well-written description that includes relevant keywords will attract users and make them click through to your page, thus CTR will grow and it'll positively affect behavior factors of your website.

Moreover, during the latest webmaster hangout (Dec 12) John Mueller — Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google suggested updating your meta descriptions to support the longer search results snippets. Watch this video here:

We're increasing the recommended description length at our
Audit module from 100-140 characters to 300 characters.

If Google considers that your description is not relevant to a user's query, it will form a snippet based on your body text. Google highlights in bold not only the keywords you've typed to the search bar, but also the LSI keywords within this niche. That's why it's highly important to include relevant LSI keywords both to description and body text.