Featured snippet
Featured snippet explained
Snippets are the oldest form of answer extraction and still the best training ground. The formats are paragraph, list, table and video. Google picks the format from the question shape, so the page has to match: a how-many question wants a number in the first line, a how-to question wants an ordered list, a comparison wants a table.
Winning them is a rewriting exercise more than a link building one. Put the question in an H2, answer it in the first forty to sixty words, keep sentences short, and do not bury the answer under a paragraph of throat clearing.
Snippet blocks are also the blocks AI Overviews tends to reuse, so the work pays twice.
Problems this term shows up in
Service that owns this work: Answer Engine Optimization
A featured snippet is the block Google places at the top of results containing an answer extracted verbatim from a page, with a link to that page.
One definition is worth more than ten opinions
Every term here links to the service that owns the work and the tool that measures it.
Read next
Three things you can test this week
None of these need a tool or a vendor. They take an afternoon and they tell you whether featured snippet is actually your problem.
Our own measurement method, with its definitions and stated limits, is published on the method page.
The definition is the easy part
Knowing what a term means takes five minutes. Knowing whether it is your problem takes an afternoon, and knowing what to do about it takes a method.
Every glossary page here ends with three checks you can run yourself and the primary sources behind them, because a definition you cannot act on is trivia.
Primary sources
Primary documentation for the mechanics described on this page. All published by the organisations that operate the systems in question.
Twenty buying prompts, four engines, you against three named competitors. Report in one working day. No call needed.
Featured snippet: common questions
Do featured snippets still get clicks?
Fewer than they used to, and fewer again when an AI Overview sits above them. They remain a strong signal of extractable content.
How long should the answer paragraph be?
Roughly forty to sixty words. Longer gets truncated, shorter often gets skipped.
Can you lose a snippet?
Constantly. Treat retention as a tracked metric, not a one time win.
See what the engines say about you
Twenty buying prompts, four engines, your brand against three named competitors. Report in one working day.
- 20 buying prompts, your category
- ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews
- You against three named competitors
- Report in one working day, yours to keep