Featured snippet
A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google pulls to the top of results, above the normal links, to answer a question directly. Winning it means being quoted as the answer — the SEO forerunner of today's AI answers.
A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google lifts to the very top of the results — above the normal blue links — to answer a question directly. It might be a paragraph, a list, or a small table, pulled from a page Google judges to answer the query best. Winning it is sometimes called ranking in “position zero.”
Earning one comes down to answering a specific question cleanly: a self-contained paragraph right after the question, or a clearly structured list or table, on a page that already ranks well for the query. Notice how close this is to being quoted by an AI assistant — the featured snippet was the early, on-Google version of the same shift toward answers over links.
That’s why the tactics carry straight over to AEO. The bigger picture is in search is splitting into three.
Quick recall
What is a featured snippet? A boxed direct answer Google shows at the top of results, above the normal links.
How do you win one? Answer a specific question cleanly — a tight paragraph, list, or table — on a page that already ranks.
Why does it matter now? It’s the forerunner of AI answers; the same tactics feed AEO.
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