Featured snippet
The answer box above the normal results, where a search engine quotes a paragraph, list, or table straight off one page.
See it
What it is
A featured snippet is a chunk of one page's content promoted above the normal results with the source link attached. Four common shapes: paragraph (roughly 40 to 60 words answering a 'what is' or 'how does' question), list (steps or rankings pulled from ordered or bulleted markup), table (comparisons and specs), and video (a timestamped clip).
You win one by being quotable, not by being clever. Put a question phrased the way people search it in an H2, answer it directly in the very next sentence in one self-contained paragraph, then elaborate below. Use real list and table markup for step and comparison questions. You generally need to be in the top 10 already, so this is a formatting play on pages that rank, not a rescue for pages that don't.
Gotcha: winning can cost you clicks. If the box fully answers the query, plenty of people never visit (a zero-click search), so the snippets worth chasing are the ones that answer a question and open a bigger one. Snippets also flip between sites without warning, and the only lever you have is opting out with a data-nosnippet attribute or a max-snippet robots directive, which also trims your ordinary result text.
Ask AI for it
Restructure this article to win the paragraph featured snippet for the query '[query]'. Add an H2 that matches the query wording, then immediately answer it in one self-contained paragraph of 40 to 55 words that makes sense with zero surrounding context, defines any term it uses, and contains no pronouns pointing at earlier text. Below it, expand with the detail, caveats, and examples. If the query is a 'how to' or comparison, give me an ordered list or a real HTML table version instead. Keep my existing voice and do not pad word count.