GLOSSARY
Featured snippet
- Featured snippet
- A featured snippet is Google's classic 'position zero' — a passage lifted from one page and shown above the ranked results as the direct answer. It's the ancestor of today's AI answers, and the writing that won snippets (direct, self-contained, question-shaped) is the same writing AI engines extract and cite.
Featured snippets were the first mainstream proof that search would rather answer than list. Google identified a question-shaped query, found the page passage that answered it most cleanly, and displayed that passage above every ranked result — one winner, everyone else below the fold. The optimization discipline that grew around snippets was passage-level answer writing, a decade before anyone said AEO.
The lineage to AI answers is direct. AI Overviews generalize the snippet: instead of lifting one passage from one page, they synthesize from several and cite them. The selection logic still rewards the same properties — a passage that answers the question completely, in plain language, without needing surrounding context. Pages that historically won snippets convert to AI citations at a noticeably higher rate, because they already pass the extraction test.
Snippets still exist and still matter — they remain a citation pathway and a visibility surface in their own right, especially for definitional and how-much queries. The practical takeaway: snippet optimization was never busywork, and if your site earned snippets, you have a head start. The same inventory of question-shaped headings and direct answers is your AEO foundation; the new work is extending it across engines that Google doesn't run, and measuring it with a prompt set instead of a rank tracker.