Featured snippet
A featured snippet is an organic result promoted to the top of the results page and expanded to answer the query directly. Its text is extracted from the page rather than written by the search engine, and the page must already rank for the query to be eligible.
The snippet is an extraction, not a rewrite. The engine finds the passage on your page that answers the question and lifts it, along with the page title and URL. That has a direct implication for how you write: content that answers a question in a self-contained block can be extracted, and content where the answer is spread across three paragraphs cannot.
The common formats are a short paragraph of roughly forty to sixty words, an ordered or unordered list, and a table. Matching the format to the question type matters — a “how to” question is extracted as steps, a “what is” question as a paragraph.
Two honest caveats. Eligibility requires already ranking on the first page for the query, so a snippet is a promotion, not a shortcut. And winning one does not always increase traffic: if the snippet fully answers the question, the user may not click at all.
You can opt out with the max-snippet or nosnippet robots directives, which
some publishers do deliberately.