Content Marketing
Featured Snippet
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What is Featured Snippet?
A featured snippet is a special search result that appears at the top of Google's organic results — above position one — and displays a direct answer to a user's query extracted from a webpage, along with the page's title and URL. Common formats include paragraph snippets, numbered lists, bulleted lists, and tables.
Featured snippets were long called "position zero" because they appear before the standard ranked results; since January 2020 Google counts the snippet as the page's position-one listing and no longer repeats that page lower on the first page. Google algorithmically selects content it believes most directly answers a query, so earning a featured snippet requires clearly structured, authoritative, and concise answers that match the format of the query type.
Why it matters for SEO
Featured snippets can dramatically increase click-through rates for the pages that earn them, often driving more traffic than a standard first-position result. They are also a key source of answers for voice search queries and AI-generated search overviews, making snippet optimization increasingly important as search evolves.
Example
For the query "how long to boil an egg", a cooking site places a direct answer right under its H2: "Boil eggs for 6 minutes for a jammy yolk, 9 minutes for medium and 12 minutes for hard-boiled." followed by a short table of times. That concise, question-matching format is what Google tends to extract as a paragraph or table snippet.
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