Check this page with an assistantOpens a chat asking it to summarise this article and name the evidence behind each claim.
Claude opens with the prompt on your clipboard: Anthropic does not support prefilled prompts on the web, and we would rather copy it than ship a button that drops it.
What Happened to Position Zero
Featured snippets have not disappeared, they have been displaced. Generated answers now occupy the top of the results page for complex and comparative queries, while snippets persist mostly on simple factual, definitional, and how-to searches. One widely circulated dataset put snippet visibility dropping from roughly 15% of results in early 2025 to around 5.5% by the middle of that year.
Treat that figure as an indication of direction rather than a measurement of your category. It comes from a third-party tracking dataset without a published methodology you can inspect, and snippet prevalence varies enormously by query type and market. What is not in dispute, because you can observe it by searching, is that the space at the top of the page is now frequently occupied by something other than a snippet.
The more useful reframing is that snippets stopped being an endpoint and became an input. Google has described its generated answers as drawing on the same underlying understanding of web content, and the passages that were good snippet candidates, short, direct, and self-contained, are exactly the passages that are easy to quote in a generated response. The work did not become worthless; its output moved.
The Prize Was Always Ambiguous
Winning a featured snippet has never reliably meant winning traffic. If the snippet answers the question completely, the searcher has no reason to continue, and the site that supplied the answer gets an impression and a citation instead of a visit.
This is worth saying plainly because snippet chasing was sold for years as an unambiguous win. The honest version: a snippet is excellent for being seen and named, unreliable for being visited, and the outcome depends almost entirely on whether the question has a natural follow-up. "What is the capital of France" has none. "How do I fix a leaking radiator valve" has several, and the person will want the detail.
That gives you a selection rule. Target snippet-shaped answers on questions where the short answer creates the next question rather than closing it, and where your page is the obvious place to get that next answer. On questions that resolve completely in two sentences, write the two sentences for the visibility and do not build a traffic forecast on it. The broader dynamic is in zero-click searches.
The Format That Still Works
A heading phrased as the question people actually ask, followed immediately by a direct answer of roughly forty to sixty words that makes sense on its own, followed by the detail. That structure has been the snippet recipe for years and it is now the extractability recipe as well.
- Rank first, format second.
Google selects snippets from pages already performing for the query. Formatting a page that sits on page four changes nothing. Your snippet opportunities are the queries where you already rank in roughly the top five, which you can pull straight from Search Console.
- Match the question's wording.
Use the phrasing people search, not the phrasing your industry prefers. A heading reading "How much does X cost?" works where "Investment considerations" does not, and the difference is not stylistic.
- Answer before you qualify.
The direct answer comes first, the caveats after. Writers instinctively build to a conclusion, which puts the quotable sentence at the end of a section where nothing can extract it cleanly.
- Make the passage self-contained.
No "as mentioned above", no pronouns referring to the previous paragraph. If the passage is lifted out of the page entirely, it should still make sense, because that is precisely what happens to it.
- Use the right shape for the question.
Definitions want a paragraph, processes want a numbered list, comparisons want a real HTML table. Matching the answer format to the question type is most of the remaining craft here.
Where to Find the Opportunities
Export queries by page from Search Console and filter to question phrasings where you already rank in the top five. Those are pages with proven relevance and, frequently, no direct answer anywhere on them. Adding one is a fifteen-minute edit rather than a new page.
| Signal | What it suggests | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Question query, position 2–5, low CTR | Something above you is answering it | Add a direct answer under a matching heading |
| Question query, position 1, low CTR | The answer is being resolved on the results page | Accept the visibility; target the follow-up question instead |
| Many question queries on one page | The page is a de facto FAQ | Give each question its own heading and answer block |
| High impressions, no clicks, informational query | Possibly appearing in a generated answer | Check the generative AI report if you have it |
The second row is the one people misread as failure. Ranking first with a low click rate on a question query is frequently the system working as designed: you are the source, the answer was given, and nobody needed to travel. That is worth understanding before somebody rewrites a page that is doing its job.
Controlling What Gets Shown
You cannot opt into a snippet and you can opt out. The nosnippet directive prevents a text snippet entirely, max-snippet caps its length in characters, and data-nosnippet excludes specific elements within an otherwise eligible page.
Use them narrowly. Suppressing snippets sitewide makes your results less informative and less clickable, which is a straightforward loss for a speculative gain. The legitimate uses are specific: content that should not be reproduced out of context, material under licensing constraints, or a passage that reads badly when extracted.
It is worth knowing that these controls also govern what can be shown in AI features, which is a different decision from whether crawlers may access your content at all. The separation between snippet controls, crawler access, and the generative opt-out is set out in the AI crawler decision guide and our read of the Search Console AI reports.
Questions People Ask About Featured Snippets
- Do featured snippets still exist in 2026?
Yes, but far less often than they did. They remain common on simple factual, definitional, and procedural queries, while generated answers have taken over the top of the page for more complex ones. One widely cited dataset put featured snippet visibility falling from about 15% of results in January 2025 to around 5.5% by mid-2025, which is the scale of the shift rather than a precise measurement of your market.
- Is it still worth optimising for featured snippets?
The formatting is worth doing and the goal has changed. The same structure that wins a snippet, a question-shaped heading with a short direct answer beneath it, is what makes a passage cleanly extractable for a generated answer. You are no longer chasing a traffic prize so much as making your content quotable, which pays across more surfaces than snippets ever did.
- How do I get a featured snippet?
There is no markup and no submission. Google selects snippets automatically from pages already ranking well for the query, so the prerequisites are ranking on the first page and having a passage that directly answers the question in roughly forty to sixty words, positioned immediately under a heading that matches how the question is asked.
- Can winning a featured snippet reduce my traffic?
It can, and this has been observed for years. If the snippet fully answers the question, many people have no reason to click. That makes snippets valuable for visibility and brand presence but unreliable as a traffic tactic, which is why the sensible target is questions where the answer creates a follow-up rather than closing the matter.
- How do I stop Google using my content in a snippet?
Use the nosnippet directive to prevent a text snippet entirely, max-snippet to cap its length, or data-nosnippet on specific elements to exclude just those parts. Be aware that suppressing snippets generally reduces how compelling your result looks, so this is a tool for specific content you do not want reproduced rather than a general tactic.
