Definition
Featured snippet
A featured snippet is the answer box at the very top of some Google results, where Google quotes a short answer pulled directly from a web page.
When you ask Google a question like "how late is this place open" or "does it take reservations," it sometimes lifts a concise answer out of a web page and shows it in a box above the normal results, with a link back to the source. That box is a featured snippet. Being the page Google quotes puts your name and answer in the single most prominent spot on the results page, and voice assistants often read that same snippet aloud.
Featured snippets are the older cousin of today's AI Overviews: both hand the searcher an extracted answer instead of a list of links, and both reward pages that are clearly structured and directly answer a real question. The trend is unmistakably toward the answer over the ten blue links. About 58% of U.S. adults ran a search that produced an AI summary, and when a summary appears people click a traditional result far less: 8% vs 15%. Winning the snippet and being quotable to AI are increasingly the same skill.
You earn snippets by answering the specific questions diners actually ask, in plain language, on well-structured pages, reinforced with Schema markup so machines can read them cleanly. This overlaps heavily with Generative engine optimization (GEO) and Local SEO, and a modern website builder can generate the question-answering content and markup automatically. See local SEO.
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