Google’s video carousel, the horizontally scrolling row of video results that sits inside Search, is showing up on far fewer queries than it did two weeks ago. Semrush Sensor measured the carousel on just over 30 percent of the queries it tracks; that share has since fallen under 20 percent. One measurement shows a real decline. A second, independent tracker puts the drop at a much steeper rate, and the two numbers should not be blended into one.
Jonas Sickler runs that second tracker. He follows 1,200 brand-name searches drawn from the Fortune 1000 and the Forbes list, checked daily. His chart, shared on LinkedIn and reported by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, shows the carousel falling from about 40 percent of those searches to about 5 percent. Sickler pinned the shift to a specific date. He said August 12 brought a sharp change for brand-name results. The count of brands whose pages carried a carousel fell 85 percent that day, a slide from just over 30 percent of tracked brands down near 5 percent.
These are two separate readings of the same SERP feature, not one figure stated twice. Semrush’s sample spans a broad set of tracked queries and shows roughly a third of the feature’s earlier presence gone. Sickler’s narrower set of branded searches shows something closer to disappearance, an 85 percent decrease concentrated on one date. Averaging the two would flatten the more useful part of the signal: the decline looks far sharper on brand-name queries than across the wider pool Semrush tracks.
Neither number comes from Google. Both are third-party trackers watching Google’s results pages from the outside, and Google has not confirmed any change to how or when it displays video carousels. Schwartz’s report does not connect this decline to any other Google update from this period, and no such link has been established here.
A historical parallel is worth noting. Two years ago, Google dropped support for the structured-data markup that once told publishers their pages qualified for the video carousel, and the carousel kept appearing anyway. That history shows the feature can outlive a markup change. It says nothing about why visibility would fall now, since neither tracker nor Google has offered a mechanism for this particular drop.
The stakes are straightforward for any site that competes for that placement. A SERP feature appearing less often is a ranking surface some pages no longer reach. Video content built specifically to win a carousel slot now has fewer slots to win. A team that saw video impressions drop around August 12 in Search Console has a candidate explanation here, not a confirmed cause. Neither tracker’s methodology has been checked against Google’s own reporting.
Search teams running video for carousel visibility should pull impression and click data for video-eligible pages across early and mid-August. Compare that against both trackers’ timelines before shifting budget away from video. If Semrush’s broader sample keeps showing the feature at a reduced rate over the coming weeks, that is a signal worth acting on. If it snaps back, this was a narrow, brand-name-driven blip rather than a lasting change to the SERP.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the decline on August 19, 2026.
