Featured Snippet

It reverses the usual result. Google describes featured snippets as special boxes that show the descriptive snippet first, and says they can also appear inside the related questions group known as People Also Ask^[1]. Its help pages add that they are shown when people want an answer found in a short piece of a website, which suits phones and voice^[2].

It cannot be claimed. Asked how to mark a page as a featured snippet, Google answers that you can’t: its systems decide whether a page would make a good one for a search, and raise it if so^[1]. What a site controls is the passage, a question answered plainly under the heading that asks it, which is the core of answer engine optimization.

A click lands on the passage. Google says a click on a featured snippet takes the user to the section of the page it showed, scrolling there automatically where the browser supports it^[1]. Search Console counts it as one result: a click on its link is a click, and it typically occupies position 1^[3].

It has policies of its own. A featured snippet on a topic of public interest should not contradict well-established or expert consensus, and a site with many snippets that break the rules can stop being shown in featured snippets at all; the policies apply to the snippet, not to the page’s regular listing^[2].

The controls live in the page, not in robots.txt. Google names nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex as the ways to limit what Search shows from a page^[4]. Statements of preference in robots.txt are not on that list; in QueryRev’s study, 59 of the 5,637 robots.txt files read, 1.0%, carry the Content Signals Policy preamble that Cloudflare writes above a managed file^[5].

Through queries and the results page. Search Console counts a featured snippet like any result at its position^[3], so look for question queries where a page of yours sits at position 1 and its click-through rate changes sharply as the box comes and goes.

Check the results page for your tracked question queries on a schedule: which page holds the box, the passage shown and the heading it came from. A rank tracker that records the features of each results page gives the same at scale.

Judge it by what it earns. A box that answers the question fully can end the search without a click, the pattern described under zero-click search; clicks and conversions from the page that holds it are the measure, not the box alone.

Sample data: an invented site, to show the method.

A garden centre ranks third for “when to plant tulip bulbs”, and a competitor’s page holds the featured snippet. The centre’s guide answers the question in its fourth paragraph, after a story about the founder’s first garden.

The rewrite puts the question in a heading and the answer in the two sentences under it, then gives the detail by region. The passage is the only change, and whether Google picks it is read over the following weeks.