A new study has been published by Stone Temple Consulting on the Google search results around featured snippets. Featured snippets are Google’s answers that show up at the top of the search results, which can sometimes be referred to as position zero. Featured snippets are used quite often for Google Voice search results in Google Assistant or Google Home.
Stone Temple’s study was based on 1.4 million queries and shows that for over half of these queries, Google has shown a featured snippet, direct answer, rich answer or something of that like in the search results. The featured snippet growth over the years in the search results is pretty significant – around 30 percent of those 1.4 million queries showed features snippets.
The following chart shows the growth of features snippets in Google over the years:
The shows that of the 601 featured snippets results in the 1.4 million queries, in 89.9 percent (524) of these, the “featured snippet was identical to the regular snippet associated with the search result.” The remaining 10 percent fell under one of these following cases:
One of the common things found between featured snippets and the core webs search results snippet is that “451 (75 percent) of the featured snippets” in the study “had three or more lines in the regular snippet.” Basically, there’s a strong correlation between longer snippets and those snippets being used as a featured snippet in Google.
Check out the full study over here.