Fundamentals

Featured Snippet

A featured snippet is a short answer pulled from a page and displayed in a box at the top of Google's results, above the normal listings.

Winning one ("position zero") gives strong visibility, though it can also satisfy the user without a click. Concise, directly-phrased answers, often a definition, list, or table, are most likely to be selected. Structuring content to answer the question cleanly is how you compete for them.

Snippets are volatile and can change hands weekly, so they are worth chasing as a group, not one at a time. The mechanics reward specific formatting. If the current snippet is a numbered list, a paragraph answer rarely displaces it, and the reverse is equally true. Matching the format is often more effective than writing a better answer in the wrong shape. Snippets can also be lost by editing the paragraph that won them, which happens more often than teams realise during content refreshes. Note what wins one before rewriting the page around it.