How to write for featured snippets and AI answers

Google builds a featured snippet by lifting part of a page that already ranks. It does not ask you, there is no markup to add, and the only thing you control is whether a liftable passage exists.

You are not writing a page for a snippet. You are writing a good page and making sure it contains one passage in the right shape.

This is the one that wins most often and the one most pages get wrong, because writers warm up before answering.

• Heading: the question, phrased the way it is searched. “What is a soft 404?” beats “Understanding soft 404 errors”.
• First sentence: the definition or the answer, complete on its own, with no pronoun pointing back at the heading.
• Next one or two sentences: the qualification that stops the answer being misleading.
• Then stop, and start a new paragraph for the detail.

A how-to query is usually answered with a list. Two things decide whether yours is the one shown.

1. 1

   Name the number in the heading

   “How to share a calendar link in four steps” tells the engine how many items to expect and tells the reader how much work it is.

2. 2

   Use a real ordered list

   Numbered list markup, not paragraphs that begin with “First,” and “Next,”. The structure is what gets lifted.

3. 3

   Keep each step to one line

   A step that runs three sentences will be truncated. Put the explanation in the paragraph under the list, not inside the item.

4. 4

   Make the steps self-contained

   Each one starts with a verb and names the screen or the file. “Open /settings/scheduling” rather than “Then go there”.

Comparison queries are answered with a table more often than writers expect, and a table is also the single easiest thing for an assistant to quote accurately.

• A real HTML table with a header row. An image of a table is invisible; a list of bullets is not a table.
• Short cells: a value, a unit, a short phrase. Long prose in a cell defeats the shape.
• Three to five columns. Wider tables get cut and are unreadable on a phone anyway.
• The first column is the thing being compared, so the row makes sense out of context.

This is also the shape that survives being pasted into a chat, which is how a lot of comparison reading now happens.

Search-backed assistants retrieve pages from an index and cite the ones that answer the question directly, with clear structure, consistent naming, and lists, comparisons and figures they can quote. That description is the three shapes above.

• The liftable paragraph is what a written answer paraphrases, with your page as the citation.
• The numbered list survives summarisation better than prose, because the order carries meaning.
• The table gives an assistant values it can state without interpreting them.
• Consistent naming matters more than it does for Google: call your product and its features the same thing on every page, or the answer will not connect them.

Two preconditions sit under all of it. You have to be in the index the assistant reads, and the answering crawlers have to be allowed in your robots.txt. There is no submission mechanism and no way to buy a citation.

Snippets are lifted from pages that already rank, usually from the first page of results. So this is a job for the queries where you are close, not the ones where you are nowhere.

1. 1

   List your queries in positions three to ten

   The Performance report in Search Console, Queries tab, filtered by position. These are the candidates.

2. 2

   Keep the ones phrased as questions

   What, why, how, when, and comparisons. Navigational and transactional queries rarely show a snippet.

3. 3

   Search each one and look

   Is there a snippet? What shape is it? Who holds it? If one exists, you know exactly which shape to write.

4. 4

   Add the passage to your page

   A heading that matches the question, the answer under it in the right shape. You are adding a passage, not rewriting the page.

5. 5

   Wait, then check again

   Give it a few weeks. Snippets change hands often, and holding one is not permanent.

A snippet that fully answers the question can reduce the clicks on that query: the searcher got what they came for. This is the honest trade and it is worth making with your eyes open.

• Worth it: comparison, product and how-to queries where the snippet answers step one and the detail is on your page. The snippet acts as the advert.
• Worth it: queries where you are not yet first. A snippet puts you above the page that outranks you.
• A trade: definition queries where the answer is the whole page. You get the visibility and fewer clicks. Take it if the brand exposure matters to you, skip it if the page exists to convert.
• Not a strategy: writing thin question-and-answer pages hoping for snippets. They win nothing and they are the pattern Google's scaled content guidance describes.

The same trade applies to being cited by an assistant, with one difference: the citation reaches people who were never going to see a results page at all.