Featured Snippet.

The featured snippet is a box at the head of the search results page that answers a question directly — through a paragraph, a list or a table, always with an attribution and a link. Because it sits above the first regular listing, it is commonly referred to as 'position zero' and attracts an above-average share of clicks and visibility. It is not an ad and cannot be bought; Google assembles it from pages already in the results.

Google generates featured snippets automatically from pages it considers the clearest, most relevant answer. You cannot reserve one through markup, but you can make a page a plausible candidate: answer a specific question immediately in one or two precise sentences, structure the surrounding content into clean paragraphs, lists and tables, and phrase relevant H2 and H3 headings as the questions people actually type. Content written to be lifted out as a self-contained answer stands the best chance.

There are several formats. The paragraph snippet gives a short prose answer, the list snippet a step-by-step or bulleted sequence, and the table snippet a set of comparative data. Which one appears depends on the search intent behind the query: 'How do I bake bread?' tends to produce a list, whereas 'What is a title tag?' tends to produce a paragraph. Matching the format to the intent is as important as the wording itself.

An example: an SEO agency opens its glossary entry with the question 'What is a featured snippet?' as an H2 and follows it immediately with a clear two-sentence definition. That increases the likelihood of exactly that passage being placed in the answer box, complete with a prominent link back. The same page structure also helps AI assistants, which extract answers on very similar principles. That overlap is worth planning for: content written to be quotable in isolation serves both the classic answer box and the citation logic of AI search.