What is Featured Snippet?
The extracted answer box at the top of classic Google results — the pre-AI ancestor of today's generated answers.
Definition
A featured snippet is the answer box Google extracts verbatim from a webpage and places above organic results — “position zero.” It was the original answer-engine surface: one source, quoted directly, with a link.
AI Overviews are progressively absorbing this real estate, synthesizing from multiple sources instead of quoting one. But snippet optimization skills — concise definitions, direct answers under headings, list and table formatting — transfer almost perfectly to GEO.
Why it matters
Pages that win featured snippets are answer-shaped by definition, and answer-shaped passages are what retrieval systems quote. Snippet wins also correlate with the extractable clarity that earns AI citations. Where snippets still appear, they remain valuable: they're the last surface where your exact words appear at the top of Google with your link attached.
Frequently asked
Are featured snippets dying?
Shrinking, not dead. AI Overviews replace them on a growing share of queries, but many informational queries still show classic snippets — and the same content wins both.
How do I optimize for snippets and AI answers at once?
Answer the question in 40–60 words directly under a question-form heading, then elaborate. That passage serves snippets, voice assistants, and LLM retrieval simultaneously.
Related terms
- FAQ SchemaStructured data marking question-answer pairs on a page, making answers machine-readable for search engines and AI retrieval systems.
- AI CitationsThe linked sources an AI assistant credits when generating an answer. Being cited is the AI-era equivalent of ranking #1.
- AI CrawlerBots operated by AI companies — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended — that fetch web content for model training or live answer retrieval.
- AI OverviewsGoogle's AI-generated summaries shown above traditional results, now appearing on roughly half of searches and dramatically reducing clicks to websites.