Featured Snippets

Google chooses featured snippets automatically from pages already ranking on the results page, and a site cannot mark itself up as one^[2]. A site can suppress them: a low max-snippet value usually removes the box, though Google says that is not guaranteed, and the nosnippet rule is the only certain block^[4]. Ahrefs' 2017 study of roughly 112 million US keywords found 12.29% carried a featured snippet, almost 14 million keywords^[5].

An audit presented at AAAI ICWSM 2026 ran 1,508 real baby-care and pregnancy queries and found an AI Overview on 84% of them against a featured snippet on 32.5%^[3]. The audit covers one health vertical, where Google answers directly more often than average, so the ratio is not a sitewide rate.

Ahrefs compared 150,000 US keywords carrying an AI Overview with 150,000 that do not, against a December 2023 baseline, and measured a 58% reduction in click-through to the top organic result by December 2025, up from a 34.5% reduction earlier in the year^[6]. The boxes above position one absorb much of what a first-place ranking used to be worth, the mechanism behind zero-click search.

Holding a snippet and being cited by an AI answer are different jobs. SISTRIX tracked 82,619 prompts and 1,548,213 snapshots across six countries over 17 weeks and found AI Overviews the most stable surface, with not one cited source changing across the whole period for 53% of prompts, against weekly turnover of 56% for AI Mode and 74% for ChatGPT Search^[7]. The same study found AI Overviews and AI Mode cite different domains for the same prompt 83% of the time, a Jaccard index of 0.17^[8].

The snippet and the AI citation are won differently. A snippet is drawn automatically from a page already ranking, with no markup to request one^[2], so the work is ranking and phrasing an answer plainly. An AI citation is a separate draw from a separate pool: AI Overviews and AI Mode cite different domains for the same prompt 83% of the time^[8]. AI Overviews is the more durable of the two surfaces, with no cited source changing across seventeen weeks for 53% of prompts^[7], so a citation held there is worth more than a snippet held on the same query.