Featured snippet

A featured snippet is the answer box Google places at the top of the results (often called position zero), pulling a concise answer directly from a ranking page along with a link. It can be a paragraph, a list, a table, or a video moment, depending on the question. Google selects it algorithmically from pages that already rank well for the query, choosing the one that most cleanly answers the specific question.

Featured snippets are the direct ancestor of AI-era passage extraction. The same properties that win a snippet, a clear question-shaped heading followed by a tight, self-contained answer of roughly 40 to 60 words, a clean list for step or comparison questions, a simple table for data, are the properties that make a passage extractable by answer engines. Optimizing for snippets is, in effect, practicing for AI citation.

The strategic nuance is that a featured snippet can be a double-edged sword: it can capture the click by answering in place (a zero-click outcome), but it also brands you as the authoritative source and is frequently the source an AI Overview draws from. As AI Overviews expand, some featured snippets are being subsumed into them. The durable move is the same either way: structure your most important answers as clean, extractable passages so you win whichever box Google shows.