Featured Snippet

How does Google choose a featured snippet?

By extracting a passage that answers the query directly from a page already ranking for it. Nothing is submitted and nothing is marked up: the mechanism is passage selection, which is why a well-structured section under a question-shaped heading is the whole technique. There is no schema type for a featured snippet and never has been. The page it comes from does not need to be first. Google selects the passage that answers best from among the pages already ranking, which is why a well-written page in position six can take the snippet from the page in position one, and why the snippet is the most winnable position on a results page for a smaller site.

The one control Google does give is negative. nosnippet, data-nosnippet and max-snippet limit what can be extracted, and using them removes you from featured snippets along with everything else that quotes you.

Is a featured snippet the ancestor of the AI Overview?

Mechanically, yes, and the family resemblance is the useful part. A featured snippet extracts one passage from one page; an AI Overview assembles a written answer from several, using query fan-out to search subtopics first. Both are Google reading pages and deciding which sentences answer the question, and both are governed by the same snippet controls.

That continuity is why the writing that won featured snippets still works. A question as a heading with a complete, self-contained answer beneath it was the recipe for one and is the recipe for the other, which is unusually good news in a field where most tactics did not transfer.

Are featured snippets still worth targeting?

Yes, with the click expectation adjusted. A snippet answers the searcher, so a proportion of the traffic it earns you never arrives: Semrush’s clickstream study found 25.6% of desktop searches and 57% of mobile ones ending without a click. Being the source of the answer is worth something even when the click does not happen, and it is worth strictly more than being the fourth blue link under somebody else’s snippet.

The recommendation, and it is a position: write for the extraction and stop measuring it by clicks alone. If your reporting can only see sessions, a successful snippet looks like a flat line. One structural note that still applies: the passage Google selects is usually the one directly under a heading matching the question, which makes the heading the single highest-leverage edit on most pages.

Related terms

• AI OverviewAn AI Overview is the written summary Google places above its ordinary search results, assembled from web pages and shown with links to a few of them.
• Answer BlockAn answer block is a short passage near the top of a page that answers the page’s question completely and on its own.
• Zero-Click SearchA zero-click search is a search that ends without the searcher clicking through to any website.
• SERPA SERP is a search engine results page: everything an engine returns for a query, including the organic links, the ads and the features above and between them.