AI SEO Glossary
What is Featured Snippet?
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TL;DR — A featured snippet is the extracted answer box Google displays at the top of the results page — often called position zero — quoting a passage, list, or table pulled directly from a ranking page, with a link to its source. Snippets are won, not submitted: Google selects the page whose formatting most cleanly answers the query, typically a 40–60 word definition, a step list, or a comparison table placed near a matching heading. Snippet-shaped content has a second life in the AI era: the same crisp, extractable answers are what LLM retrieval prefers to quote.
Definition & scope
The optimization pattern is answer-first writing: pose the question as a heading, answer it completely in the first sentence or two, then elaborate. Pages structured this way win snippets, People Also Ask slots, and AI citations with the same asset.
Snippets cannibalize some clicks (the zero-click effect) but carry outsized authority — for definitional and how-to queries in a category, owning the snippet is owning the conversation's opening line.
Related terms
- Zero-Click Search — the behavior snippets drive.
- People Also Ask — the sibling Q&A surface.
- Google AI Overviews — the AI successor to the snippet block.
Related services
- AEO Services — snippet-grade answer structure across the site.
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