Featured Snippet
A featured snippet is a box in Google's search results that shows a short piece of a website answering your question. Google shows one when it thinks people want an answer that a short piece of a page can give. It can appear at the top of the results, inside People Also Ask, or next to Knowledge Graph information.
Source: Google Search Help, How Google's featured snippets work, checked October 29, 2026
What Featured Snippet means for your business
You'll also hear it called an answer box, an answer snippet or position zero. Google's guide for site owners says you can't mark a page as a featured snippet; Google's systems decide whether a page would make a good one.
Google also says it gives no exact minimum length for a snippet, because that changes with the content, the language and the device. So we'd treat any word count you read about as a rule of thumb that Google hasn't confirmed.
What we'd work on is the page. Put the question buyers type in a heading, answer it plainly in the sentence right below, then give the detail. That's most of what we'd call snippet optimization, and it makes the page easier to skim whether Google picks it or not.
If you used to win these boxes and see fewer of them now, our answer engine optimization page covers what changed and where the same work pays off today.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, no featured snippet showed for the question, but an AI Overview did, citing Google's two help pages alongside SEO tool blogs and YouTube, though its typical word count came from a video and a tool blog, not Google. ChatGPT cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
Related terms in answers and how content gets used
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