What is a featured snippet?
The boxed answer at the top of some results, lifted from a page that answers the question directly. Clear headings and a short, direct answer under each are what earn it.
A featured snippet is the short answer Google lifts out of a page and shows in a box above the normal results, with a link to where it came from. It is sometimes called position zero, because it sits above the first ordinary result.
Google picks the passage it thinks answers the question most directly. It might be a paragraph, a list of steps or a small table. The pages that win it are usually the ones that ask the question in a heading and answer it plainly in the next sentence or two, before going into detail.
It does not always bring more clicks. For a simple question, someone may read the answer and never visit the page. For anything that needs more than a sentence, being the source Google chose tends to bring the click, and the credibility that goes with it. The same habit, a clear heading and a direct answer under it, is what gets a page cited in AI answers too, which we explain in our piece on query fan-out.
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