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A featured snippet (also known as position zero) is a brief summary of an answer to a users question. They are displayed at the top of the search engine results page (SERPs) and are pulled from a webpage (hopefully from your webpage).

The goal here is to provide users with a quick and direct answer to their question without having to even click through to a specific search result/website.

Want to know how to make a pizza? Here you go:

Or maybe you want to know when is the best time to book flights

Or maybe you want to know who is Batman’s secret identity:

Sorry for the spoiler! According to Google, snippets are meant to “enhance and draw user attention on the results page”.

What Is NOT a Featured Snippet?

Just to make things slightly confusing, not all features that appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs) are featured snippets.

For certain searches, Google can show special search results. These ARE NOTfeatured snippets and can include:

Rich Answers

Rich Answers (or Instant Answers) are answers by generated by Google which don’t require you to click through to a site.

These answers generally cover factual things like how big is Uranus (sorry, not sorry) or how tall is the empire state building (381m, 443 m to tip if you were wondering):

Google doesn’t provide credit to websites with rich answers like these, as according to them, this information part of the public domain.

Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge Graph answers are generated from a variety of sources and appear on the right-hand side of the SERPs.

Searching for brands, people, or organizations trigger these:

Rich Snippet

Although this one contains the word snippet, it has nothing to do with featured snippets. A rich snippet is an enhancement for organic results powered by structured data (or schema markup).

Often, you’ll see these on ecommerce sites. The purpose is to help results stand out with rating stars, product availability, and pricing information:

Now we’ve got that out of the way, did you know there are actually a couple of different types of featured snippets?

Let’s take a look at them:

What Are The Different Types of Snippets?

Featured snippets come in all shapes and sizes. Well, five main types to be honest:

1. Paragraphs
2. Numbered lists
3. Bullet point lists
4. Tables
5. Youtube

1. Paragraph Snippets

Paragraph snippets are the most common snippets you’ll see. Their job is to provide a direct answer to a searcher’s query:

Quite often, these snippets also display an image. However, these are often from different sources (not the website in the featured snippet).

Paragraph snippets generally show for keywords that contain search terms such as:

• How to
• How do I
• How to get
• Who is
• Why is
• What is

2. Numbered List Snippets

Google generally show numbered list snippets when it thinks a user wants to see a series of steps in order to complete a task, like with this snippet for how to do a muscle up:

3. Bullet Point List Snippets

Everyone loves a list post right? Well, Google’s no exception. Just check out this snippet for data studio templates:

For these featured snippets, Google formats the bullet point list by pulling the headings of each section of the post.

4. Table Snippets

Although less common, Google’s crawlers can read data in tables quite well.

Often, it won’t grab all the information from the table. Instead, it will re-format the data for the snippet into what it thinks is most useful (and for better readability).

Take the above example for the search term ‘mortgage rates’. If you look at the page the data is being taken from, you’ll see that Google has removed lots of the rows & columns in order to provide a succinct answer in the snippet.

5. YouTube Snippets

It’s not just web pages that Google can construct featured snippets from, but also from places like YouTube (if it thinks that a video best answers the query):