Featured Snippets

What are Featured Snippets?

Featured snippets are special Google search results that display a short extract from a web page answering the query, shown prominently near the top of the results with a link to the source page. They usually appear as a paragraph, a bulleted or numbered list, or a table, and are chosen automatically by Google’s systems.

Snippets became common around 2014 and were often called “position zero”. They are an early form of answer engine behavior: instead of only listing links, the search engine quotes the answer directly.

How it works

Google’s systems look for pages that rank well for a query and contain a passage that directly answers it. That passage is extracted and displayed with the page title and URL. Formats:

Format	Typical query	Content that fits
Paragraph	“What is zero trust?”	40-60 word definition
List	“How to set up SSO”	Ordered steps under a heading
Table	“SIEM vs SOAR”	Comparison table with clear headers

Site owners can limit snippets with the nosnippet and max-snippet robots meta directives or the data-nosnippet HTML attribute. There is no structured data that requests a featured snippet.

Examples

• A security vendor’s glossary page answers “What is EDR?” in its first paragraph and appears as a paragraph snippet.
• A SaaS help article with numbered steps for “how to export contacts to CSV” wins a list snippet.
• A comparison page with a clean HTML table for “SAML vs OIDC” is extracted as a table snippet.

Best practices

• Target questions you already rank for on page one; snippets usually come from those pages.
• Put the answer immediately below a question-shaped H2, then expand.
• Use real HTML lists and tables, not images or styled divs.
• Keep definitions self-contained, so they make sense out of context.
• Review snippets after content updates; small edits can change which passage Google picks.

Common mistakes

• Burying the answer under long introductions.
• Writing vague answers that require the rest of the page to make sense.
• Blocking snippets with nosnippet and then wondering why click-through dropped.

Featured snippets and AI search

Featured snippets and AI answers reward the same pattern: a short, accurate, self-contained answer from a trusted page. Content that wins snippets is often well suited to being cited in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity. The difference is that AI answers synthesize multiple sources, so being one of several cited pages becomes the goal. See Google AI Overviews optimization.

Related terms

• SERP Features
• Rich Snippets
• AI Overviews
• Zero-Click Search
• Answer Engine Optimization
• Passage Ranking

Sources

• Featured snippets and your website, Google Search Central
• Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet and X-Robots-Tag specifications, Google Search Central
• AI features and your website, Google Search Central