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.”
Related terms
Explore connected concepts
Zero-Click Search
A search query where the user finds their answer directly on the search results page, through AI Overviews, featured snippets, knowledge panels, or other SERP features, without clicking through to any website. Research suggests that over 60% of Google searches now result in zero clicks, a trend accelerated by the introduction of AI-generated summaries at the top of search results.
Structured Data
Machine-readable code embedded in web pages that explicitly defines entities, attributes, and relationships using a standardised vocabulary. JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is the preferred format. It sits in a script tag on the page and tells AI systems exactly what the page is about: the organisation behind it, the author's credentials, the product details, the article's topic, and more.
Schema Markup
A standardised vocabulary maintained by Schema.org, a collaboration between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, that provides a common language for structured data on the web. Schema markup defines hundreds of entity types (Organisation, Product, Article, Person, Event, etc.) and their properties, enabling web publishers to describe their content in a way that any search engine or AI system can understand.