Featured Snippet

What is a Featured Snippet?

A featured snippet is the search engine deciding your page answers the question well enough to quote. It appears above the first organic result — historically called position zero — and takes one of a few shapes depending on the query: a paragraph for definitional questions, a numbered list for procedures, a bulleted list for sets, a table for comparisons. Winning one is less about authority than about format. The engine needs a passage it can extract without editing: a direct answer of roughly forty to sixty words, placed immediately under a heading that matches the query wording, written so it still makes sense with all surrounding context removed. The same properties that win snippets now also drive citation in AI Overviews and chat-based answer engines, which is why snippet discipline has outlived the metric that named it. The trade-off is real, though — a snippet often answers the question so completely that the user never clicks.

Why it matters

• Occupies the most prominent position on the result page, above every organic link.
• The same formatting that wins snippets is what AI answer engines lift and cite.
• Comes with a cost — a well-answered snippet can satisfy the query and suppress the click.

Use cases

• Definitional queries. A 'what is X' page structured so the definition paragraph is directly quotable.
• Procedural queries. Step-by-step content formatted as a clean numbered list.
• Comparison queries. A table that the engine can lift whole to answer 'X vs Y'.