A featured snippet is a short answer Google lifts from a ranking page and displays in a box at the very top of the results, above the ordinary links, the spot SEOs nickname "position zero." Google draws the text automatically from a page it already ranks well, then formats it as a paragraph, list, or table.
Google favours content that answers the question cleanly and early. A recipe site chasing "how long to boil an egg" originally buried the timing inside three paragraphs of backstory. The rewrite added an H2 phrased as the exact question, followed immediately by a 45-word paragraph giving the direct answer, then a numbered list of times by doneness: soft, jammy, hard. That page took the paragraph snippet, and the numbered list later surfaced in a related query too.
Yes, though the landscape has shifted. AI Overviews now sit above or absorb many snippets, and some queries that once showed a featured snippet now show an AI-generated answer instead. But the same clean, quotable structure that wins snippets also makes content easy for AI engines to cite, so the work pays off twice. The trade-off to watch is zero-click searches: a snippet can answer the question so fully that the user never visits your site.
For queries where a box or an AI answer sits between you and the click, answer engine optimization keeps your page in contention as the source that gets quoted.