At SMX Sydney Wednesday, Gary Illyes from Google said that they are looking into including answer box data into Google Webmaster Tools.  This is great news for webmasters who have sites in search results that often show answer boxes above the organic results.

There has been a lot of controversy with the answer boxes in the SEO community.  Are those featured in the box losing traffic because of them?  Are others in the search results losing traffic because no one explores results beyond the answer box?

But for users, they are certainly useful, and Google does cater to what is best for users.  It is handy to be able to ask something quickly, and get the answer right there, especially when searchers are on a mobile device.

If we do get this data, it will be good to analyze just how having an answer box may or may not affect traffic, especially since in Google Analytics webmasters can’t determine if a click was from an answer box or not.