A featured snippet is the answer box Google lifts out of a page that already ranks and places above the standard results. For years, winning one, often called position zero, was the closest thing to a shortcut to the top of search. In 2026 that has shifted. AI Overviews now sit above the snippet and occupy most of the real estate that made position zero valuable, so the classic featured snippet is no longer the main prize. The useful part: the work of winning one still pays, because the same concise, well-structured answers that earn a snippet are exactly what get quoted in an AI Overview and cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. This guide covers what still works, what has changed, and when being the answer quietly costs you the click.
Key takeaways
- AI Overviews now own the top of the page. In Ahrefs' analysis of 1,000,000 US SERPs, featured snippet visibility fell from 15.41% to 5.53% between January and June 2025, a 64% drop, while AI Overviews grew 598% to appear on more than a quarter of queries.
- The two features are closely linked. The snippet decline correlates strongly (0.9) with the rise of AI Overviews, and Google builds those overviews from the same concise, extractable passages a snippet rewards.
- Optimising for snippet-style extraction still pays, because the same practices (a direct answer up top, clean structure, clear definitions and question-and-answer formatting) are what make content citation-ready across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, per Search Engine Land.
- You still have to rank on page one. In Ahrefs' featured-snippet study, 99.58% of snippets came from pages already in the top 10, and paragraph answers of roughly 54 to 58 words won most often, per HubSpot.
- Being the answer can still cost the click. With an AI summary present, Pew Research Center found users clicked a result just 8% of the time versus 15% without one.
Position zero belongs to AI Overviews now
The single biggest change to position zero is not about featured snippets at all. It is what now sits above them. Ahrefs analysed 1,000,000 US desktop SERPs and compared the presence of each feature between January and June 2025. Over that window, featured snippet visibility dropped from 15.41% to 5.53% of results, a 64% fall, while AI Overviews grew 598%, from 3.93% to 27.43%, appearing on more than a quarter of the sample and far more often on informational queries. The two moves are not independent: the decline in snippets correlates strongly, at 0.9, with the rise of AI Overviews, and both features flipped over at the same point in March 2025. Ahrefs' own conclusion is that AI Overviews have very likely superseded featured snippets, since they serve the same job of resolving intent directly in the results.
This is why chasing the classic featured snippet as an end in itself no longer makes sense. On many queries the box you used to win has simply been replaced by a generated summary that pulls from several pages at once. But the shift is less dramatic than it looks for the person doing the work, because Google builds those overviews from the same kind of concise, well-structured passage a snippet rewards. Featured snippets and AI Overviews have long appeared alongside one another, and the content that earned a snippet is the content most ready to be quoted in an overview. The target has moved from owning a single box to being the source the answer is built from, which also feeds directly into zero-click behaviour.
It helps to see the two features side by side, because they look similar to a searcher but reward slightly different things.
| Dimension | Featured snippet | AI Overview |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A single passage lifted, mostly verbatim, from one ranking page | A generated summary that blends several sources into one answer with links |
| Where it sits | Above the standard organic results | Above everything, including the snippet, at the very top |
| Sourcing | One page, almost always from the top 10 | Multiple pages synthesised into a single response |
| Trend, Jan to June 2025 (Ahrefs) | Fell from 15.41% to 5.53% of SERPs | Grew from 3.93% to 27.43% of SERPs |
| How you earn it | Rank on page one, then format a clean, direct answer | The same clean, extractable answers, plus broad topical authority |
Why optimising for snippets still pays
If the box is fading, why bother formatting for it? Because the underlying skill has become more valuable, not less. The practices that win a featured snippet, a direct answer placed high on the page, clean headings, clear definitions and question-and-answer structure, are the same signals that answer engines look for when they decide what to quote. Search Engine Land describes generative engine optimisation as structuring content so AI platforms including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot can retrieve, cite and recommend it, and the recurring advice is to open with a clear, self-contained summary a model can lift, then add the depth a human wants underneath. That is the featured-snippet playbook applied to a wider set of surfaces.
So the effort compounds. One well-formatted answer block can win a snippet on Google, get quoted inside an AI Overview, and be pulled into a ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini response, all from the same work. The engines differ in what they favour, Perplexity leans on recency, some models lean on encyclopedic sources, but a concise, clearly structured, well-sourced answer travels across all of them. This is the same answer-first, extractable structure that helps you get cited by AI answer engines, so treating snippet formatting as dead would mean walking away from the exact habit that now drives visibility.
What still triggers a featured snippet
Where snippets do still appear, the rules that governed them have not changed. Google shows one when it decides a single passage answers the query well enough to lift up top. In Ahrefs' study of roughly 112 million US keywords, about 12.29% returned a featured snippet, and the majority were triggered by long-tail queries rather than high-volume head terms, which means depth and coverage tend to win more boxes than chasing a handful of popular keywords. If you are still building the fundamentals, it helps to understand how search engines actually work before optimising for any single feature.
The most important rule is that you have to be on page one already. In Ahrefs' data, 99.58% of featured snippets came from pages ranking in the top 10, and the small remainder were pulled from other result features. A snippet is not a way around ranking, it is a bonus layered on top of one. The encouraging part is that you do not need to be number one: only 30.9% of snippets came from the top-ranked result, so pages sitting anywhere from position two to ten can leapfrog into the box with clearer formatting. Ahrefs also found the backlink profile of the featured page was usually on par with the rest of the top 10, so Google is promoting the clearest answer, not simply the strongest page. Get the fundamentals right first with a solid on-page SEO checklist, then optimise for extraction.
Formatting to win: paragraph, list, or table
Once you rank, the lever you control is format. Google pulls snippets in a few consistent shapes, and matching the shape it wants for a given query is most of the battle. HubSpot's analysis, citing Moz data, found the paragraph snippet is the most common at about 50% of results, followed by the list at about 37%, with tables and other formats making up the rest.
| Snippet format | Best for | How to structure it |
|---|---|---|
| Paragraph | Definitions, "what is" queries, direct factual answers | Put the question in a heading, then answer immediately in a paragraph of roughly 54 to 58 words directly beneath it. |
| List | Steps, rankings, "how to" and "best" queries | Use a genuine ordered or unordered list under a clear heading, with each step or item as its own line. |
| Table | Comparisons, specs, pricing, small datasets | Use clean HTML table markup with clear headers, not an image of a table, so Google can extract the rows. |
Two practical rules follow. First, give Google both the question and a self-contained answer close together. HubSpot recommends placing the target query in a header (an H2 or H3) and putting the answer in a paragraph directly below it. Second, keep paragraph answers tight: HubSpot's sample found content between 54 and 58 words appeared in snippets far more often than longer passages. This is the same answer-first structure that also makes a passage easy for an AI Overview to quote, so the effort works across surfaces.
Pro tip. Put the target question in an H2 or H3 and answer it immediately in a self-contained paragraph of roughly 54 to 58 words. That single block is what Google lifts into a snippet and what an AI Overview is most likely to quote, so you are optimising for both at once.
Notably, you do not need schema markup to win a snippet. HubSpot found that more than 80% of the pages it studied in the snippet used no Schema.org markup at all, and Google's representatives have said structured data is not a factor for featured snippets. Clear headings and clean HTML do the work.
When being the answer costs you the click
Here is the nuance that survives the shift to AI Overviews, and matters more because of it. Being the answer does not always earn you more traffic. Ahrefs compared click-through rates and found that when a featured snippet is present, the page ranking right below it gets about 19.6% of clicks and the snippet itself about 8.6%, versus around 26% for a normal top result with no snippet above it. The box can cannibalise the click that would have gone to the number one listing, and it reduces the total clicks a query sends out, because some searchers get their answer and move on.
That is not the whole story. HubSpot ran its own test across just under 5,000 queries and found the opposite for its pages: click-through rate for high-volume keywords rose by more than 114% when it held the snippet, even while ranking number one just below the box. In its example, a keyword that might send about 1,700 visits from the standard top spot sent roughly 3,700 when HubSpot owned the snippet as well.
Both findings are real, and the difference comes down to the query. When the answer fully resolves the question, such as a simple definition or a unit conversion, the searcher has no reason to click, and you have effectively given away the answer for a smaller slice of traffic. When it teases a longer answer, such as the first few steps of a process or one row of a comparison, it acts like an advertisement for your page and can lift clicks. The format that satisfies is the one that costs you, and the format that intrigues is the one that pays.
Common mistake. Chasing every possible answer box, including pure definitions and conversions that fully resolve the query. When the answer leaves nothing to click for, you can hand away traffic for a smaller slice of it, so weigh visibility against the lost click before you optimise.
This tradeoff is sharper now that AI answers sit above everything. A Pew Research Center analysis of March 2025 browsing data found that users who saw an AI summary clicked a search result just 8% of the time, versus 15% when no summary appeared. Because Google draws on the same extractable passages to build those summaries, the structure that wins a snippet increasingly also decides whether you are quoted in an AI answer. The goal has shifted from owning a click to owning the answer, which is the reality behind the rise of zero-click search.
How to choose what to optimise for now
Because winning is not universally worth it, treat answer boxes as a portfolio and prioritise. A simple framework:
- Optimise the answer, not just the box. Format a concise, self-contained answer high on the page. It can win a snippet where one still shows, and it is the passage most likely to be quoted in an AI Overview or an LLM answer where the snippet is gone.
- Start where you already rank top 5. These are the cheapest wins, since you only reformat rather than climb the rankings. Pull your ranking keywords, filter for ones showing a snippet or an AI Overview, and reoptimise the closest pages first.
- Favour answers that invite a click. Lists, processes and partial tables draw the reader onto the page for the full version. Pure definitions often end the search, so weigh whether the visibility is worth the lost click.
- Prioritise queries tied to your product or expertise. Even an answer that reduces clicks still puts your brand and URL at the very top for a relevant question, which has branding value on commercially important terms.
The upside compounds. A single well-structured page can hold answers for many related long-tail queries at once. In Ahrefs' featured-snippet study, the top page owned snippets for 4,658 different search queries, which shows that one genuinely thorough, well-formatted resource can win position zero across an entire topic rather than one keyword at a time, and feed the AI answers built on top of it.
Frequently asked questions
Are featured snippets still worth it in 2026?
The box itself is fading. Ahrefs found featured snippet visibility fell 64% between January and June 2025 as AI Overviews grew 598%, and the two correlate at 0.9. But the work of winning a snippet is more valuable than ever, because the same concise, well-structured answer is what an AI Overview quotes and what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini cite. Optimise the answer, not the box.
Do you need to rank number one to get a featured snippet?
No. In Ahrefs' study, only 30.9% of snippets came from the top-ranked page, while 99.58% came from somewhere in the top 10. A page in positions two through ten can win the box by answering the query more clearly than the current holder, which is why formatting often beats raw authority here.
Can winning a featured snippet actually reduce my traffic?
It can. Ahrefs found the snippet takes about 8.6% of clicks while the result below it gets 19.6%, versus roughly 26% for a normal top result with no snippet, and snippets reduce total clicks on a query. But HubSpot recorded a 114% CTR lift on high-volume terms when it held the snippet. The outcome depends on whether the answer fully resolves the query or leaves the reader wanting more.
What format should my answer be in?
Match the format already showing for that query. Paragraph snippets are the most common at about 50% of results and suit definitions and direct answers, lists are next at about 37% and suit steps and rankings, and tables suit comparisons and data. For paragraph answers, aim for roughly 54 to 58 words placed directly under a heading that mirrors the question, which is also the passage most likely to be quoted in an AI Overview.
The takeaway
Position zero has changed hands. AI Overviews now occupy the top of the page and have largely superseded the classic featured snippet, so chasing the box for its own sake is no longer the goal. The optimisation behind it still matters, and arguably more, because a concise, clearly structured, well-sourced answer is what wins a snippet where one remains, what an AI Overview quotes, and what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini cite. Rank on page one first, format the answer to be lifted, keep it tight and self-contained, and be clear-eyed about the queries where being the answer takes the click with it.
Written by Matthis Duarte, a senior SEO and organic growth expert with 10+ years of experience driving organic growth for international brands across highly competitive verticals. He is the founder of Knownful, an independent publication on SEO and organic growth featuring in-depth guides, best practices, playbooks and original analyses, including a free monthly study of which brands AI actually recommends across 10 industries.
