Definition
A featured snippet is a highlighted answer box at the top of Google's search results showing an excerpt from a web page — a paragraph, list, table or video — with the source URL beneath it. Google picks the excerpt automatically from a page that already ranks highly, because it directly answers the searcher's question. The spot is therefore also called 'position zero'.
There are four forms. The paragraph snippet (a definition or short answer of 40 to 60 words) is the most common and appears for 'what is' and 'why' questions. The list snippet shows numbered or bulleted steps for 'how to' questions and rankings. The table snippet comes from an HTML table for comparisons and prices. The video snippet shows a clip from a YouTube video with a start time.
Winning featured snippets starts with ranking: nearly all snippets come from pages in the top ten, most from the top five. Then form matters. Directly beneath a heading that states the question literally, place a two- to three-sentence answer that stands on its own; use real HTML lists and tables instead of styled text; and name the entity in the answer. Google cuts the excerpt literally from your HTML, so the structure determines what gets shown.
With the arrival of AI Overviews, the playing field has shifted. For many questions where a snippet used to sit, there is now an AI summary with several sources; where Google shows no AI Overview, the featured snippet remains. The skills overlap completely: pages chosen as snippets are exactly the pages AI engines cite. Optimising for one is optimising for the other.
A featured snippet does not always bring more clicks — the answer is already on the results page — but it does bring visibility, credibility and, for questions that call for depth, a higher click-through rate than position one. Traze writes every page with a snippet-ready answer beneath the main heading and tracks per cluster whether your domain owns the snippet or the AI Overview source.