Featured Snippet
A featured snippet is a special search result that appears at the very top of Google's results page, displaying a direct answer extracted from a web page in a highlighted box.
Featured snippets are Google's attempt to answer a searcher's question directly on the results page, without requiring them to click through to a website. They appear above the #1 organic result (position zero) and include a text excerpt, paragraph, list, or table pulled from a web page, along with the page's title and URL. There are several types of featured snippets.
List snippets display step-by-step instructions or ranked items. Table snippets show data comparisons or specifications. Video snippets feature YouTube videos with timestamps for specific answers.
In practice
- A cooking website formatted their recipes with clear step-by-step lists and won featured snippets for 200+ recipe searches, increasing organic traffic by 30%
- A fintech company created a concise definition paragraph for 'what is a credit score' and captured the featured snippet, driving 15,000 additional monthly visits
- A B2B SaaS provider built comparison tables for 'X vs Y' queries and won table featured snippets for 50 competitive keywords
- A health clinic answered common patient questions in a FAQ format on their service pages, winning paragraph snippets for 30+ health-related queries
Not sure how this applies to you?
A senior engineer walks your site, your search presence and the way enquiries reach you, then writes down the three things worth fixing first. You keep the document either way.