What is a featured snippet?

A featured snippet takes one page that's already ranking, pulls out the sentence or short passage that best answers the query, and displays it above the normal list of links, with a link back to that page. It's sometimes called position zero because it sits above the first regular result.

The distinction worth holding onto is that a featured snippet and an AI Overview are not the same kind of thing, even though they can look similar at a glance. A snippet is one verbatim excerpt from one page with a direct link. An AI Overview blends and paraphrases material from several pages into new sentences, often without making any single source as prominent. Earning a featured snippet is a signal about that one page's wording matching the query well; it doesn't tell you whether the same page will be pulled into an AI Overview above it.