A featured snippet is a selected excerpt from a web page that Google displays at the top of search results to directly answer a query. It appears in a box above the first organic result, typically including the answer text, the page title, and a link to the source page.
Featured snippets appear in several formats: paragraph snippets for definition and explanation queries, list snippets for step-by-step or ranked content, and table snippets for comparative data. Google selects the snippet automatically based on which page’s content it judges as the most direct and accurate answer to the query.
Winning a featured snippet does not require ranking first. Google pulls snippets from pages ranked anywhere in the top ten, most commonly from pages ranked in positions two through five. The structural requirements are consistent: the answer must appear near the top of the relevant section, be written in clear prose or a well-formatted list, and directly address the question implied by the query. For B2B sites, definition queries about industry terminology and process queries about how to do specific tasks are the highest-probability featured snippet targets.
