AI Search Surfaces
Also: position zero, answer box
A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google pulls from a ranking page and shows at the very top of results, above the blue links. It predates AI search but rewards the same thing AI engines do: a concise, directly-stated answer that can be lifted out of the page.
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Winning a featured snippet usually means answering a specific question in one or two clean sentences near a matching heading, then elaborating below. That answer-first structure is also what AI engines extract.
Featured snippets are a major driver of zero-click searches, since the answer appears without the user needing to click through.
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