Featured Snippet

A SERP feature displaying a highlighted answer box at the top of Google results, often called "position zero".

Featured snippets appear above the regular organic results (hence "position zero") and directly answer the user's query. Types include paragraph snippets (short text answer), list snippets (numbered or bulleted steps), table snippets (comparison data), and video snippets. They receive significant clicks — though some research suggests they reduce clicks by answering the question directly without needing to visit the site.

To win featured snippets: target informational queries with clear answers ("what is X", "how to Y", "best Z"), format content to directly answer the question in the opening paragraph or immediately after an H2/H3 matching the question, use lists and tables for "how to" and comparison queries, and ensure your page already ranks in the top 10 for the query (snippets are almost always taken from existing top-10 results).

Google can remove featured snippets with the data-nosnippet attribute on specific HTML elements, or globally with <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">. Losing a featured snippet is common when competitors optimise their content specifically to win it.