Featured Snippet

A featured snippet is a highlighted search result that displays a concise answer to a user's query directly on the search results page.

It is usually extracted from a webpage that the search engine considers relevant and useful for the query.

Featured snippets often appear above traditional organic results and may include text, lists, tables, or other structured information.

Also known as: Position zero, answer box, featured search result.

How Does a Featured Snippet Work?

A search engine selects content from an indexed webpage and displays part of it prominently in the search results.

A typical process may include:

1. A user enters a question or informational query.
2. The search engine identifies pages that may answer the query.
3. Relevant sections of those pages are analyzed.
4. A concise answer is selected.
5. The selected content is displayed as a featured snippet.
6. The result points users toward the source page.

Websites cannot directly choose whether their content appears as a featured snippet.

Common Types of Featured Snippets

Paragraph Snippets

Paragraph snippets provide a short text-based answer.

They are commonly used for questions such as:

What is data normalization?
How does a proxy work?
What is an API endpoint?

Clear definitions near the beginning of a page can make content easier for search engines to interpret.