Featured snippet
What is a featured snippet?
A featured snippet is a passage from one page that Google shows in a separate box above the ordinary results, with a link to the source. It is most often a paragraph, a list or a table. Google chooses the page itself — no markup or payment puts you there — and usually takes it from a page that already ranks well for that search. The pages that stand a chance answer the question at once, without a preamble.
Example
A furniture shop has a guide to choosing a corner sofa. How to measure the room for one is explained in the fifth paragraph, after the company history. The guide ranks sixth for “how to measure for a corner sofa”, and the box above the results quotes a competitor.
We reorder the page: the question becomes a subheading, a 40–50-word answer sits right under it, followed by the steps as a numbered list and a table of standard sizes. The content stays the same; the order changes. The page now holds a passage Google can lift and show whole. Whether it does is Google’s call. Our job is to make the page eligible.
Why it matters for a business
The box sits above every competitor and puts your name in front of people who never click. That is also the catch: when the answer is short — opening hours, a unit conversion, a date — people read it and stop searching. So we aim at questions that leave a decision behind: how to choose, what to compare, when something is worth paying for. The same box can raise your clickthrough rate on one question and lower it on another, which is why we judge it by enquiries rather than by the box itself.
On many searches an AI Overview now sits at the very top: an answer written by Google, with links to its sources. Both formats favour the same thing — a page that answers a specific question plainly.
What to ask
- Which questions do we already rank well for? Those are the real candidates.
- Who holds the box today, and in what format: paragraph, list or table?
- Does our text answer within the first 40–60 words after the question, with no warm-up?
- Do we want the box at all? If the answer is the product itself — a calculator, a comparison table — Google lets you keep a passage out of snippets with the data-nosnippet attribute.
No structured data is needed for the box; it is won with the wording and the order of the page, which is how we shape content in SEO and AI search.