We’d all love our websites to rank number one in Google search results. But have you ever tried ranking zero? Yes, you read that right. Since 2014, Google has been displaying featured snippets and answer boxes that appear in “position zero”—right above normal search results. Answer boxes are helpful, clickable, and have a prime location that can boost traffic to your site. Is it possible to bag that top featured spot for your own website?

In this post, we’ll go over what a Google featured snippet is and why it’s useful, and how you can help your own website show up in an answer box.

What is a Google featured snippet?
Are there different types of featured snippets?
How important are featured snippets in my industry?
Why are featured snippets important in search?
How are featured snippets created?
Optimizing your content for a featured snippet
How do I get my website to show up in a Google answer box?
Invite Google round for a visit
It may take a little trial and error, but featured snippets are worth the effort
What is a Google featured snippet?
A featured snippet is an answer box that appears in Google above all other search results. You’ll see it in a little frame, typically with a short paragraph of text and an image.

Screenshot of a Google search for rain formation with featured snippet as the first result
Not every search query has a featured snippet, but they are becoming more frequent. Most featured snippets (63% of them) show up as paragraphs, but they also come in lists and tables.

Are there different types of featured snippets?
You’ve probably come across different snippet formats in Google searches when you’ve looked for an answer to a question. Broadly speaking, featured snippets can be divided into three categories:

Text snippets
This is a paragraph that contains text only, such as a short summary or the relevant section of an article. Wikipedia entries that include an image are often displayed in this snippet category.

List and Table snippets
It’s up to the Google algorithm to automatically decide whether a query is better displayed as a text snippet or in the form of a list of a table. Google is able to create tables and lists from text without any specific instructions.

Video snippets
For some kinds of search queries, Google displays so-called video snippets (almost exclusively from YouTube). As the name suggests, a large preview image of the video appears for video snippets.