Definition
What this term means
A highlighted answer box that appears above the standard organic search results on Google, displaying a direct answer extracted from a web page along with the source URL and page title. Featured snippets can appear as paragraphs, lists, tables, or steps, and are selected by Google's algorithms based on how well a page's content directly answers the user's query.
Why it matters
The business impact
Featured snippets occupy the most prominent position in traditional search results and frequently serve as the source content for AI Overviews and voice search responses. Capturing a featured snippet effectively gives you position zero, appearing before the first organic result. This position is particularly valuable because the content within featured snippets is often directly used by AI systems when generating their own responses.
Used in context
How you might use this term
“A fintech company structured their product comparison pages using clear tables and concise paragraph answers optimised for featured snippet capture. They won featured snippets for 15 high-value comparison queries, and their content was subsequently used as a source in Google's AI Overviews for those same queries.”