Google Tests Topic-Based Featured Snippets

Google has been experimenting with featured snippets again, this time with “topic-based” featured snippets. What are they? How do they differ from regular featured snippets? And what do they mean for SEO? Let’s take a look.

Featured Snippets: A Quick Refresher

To understand topic-based featured snippets (sometimes called expanded featured snippets), you first need to know what a featured snippet is.

On Google, there are ads (Google Ads, formerly AdWords) and organic results. But there’s also a third type of result: featured snippets. These are results Google highlights by placing them above the organic listings, in a box that makes them more eye-catching. That’s why featured snippets are often said to hold “position zero.”

Besides standing out, featured snippets usually answer a question. Search “featured snippet definition,” for example, and Google shows a definition from a marketing glossary in position zero, the result it considers the best match for the query.

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Regular vs. Topic-Based Featured Snippets

A topic-based featured snippet is a more advanced version of the classic featured snippet. It appears (or will appear: we haven’t been able to trigger one ourselves at the time of writing) when a question has several possible answers depending on the angle.

Take the query “quartz or granite,” which is clearly a comparison. Since Google doesn’t know whether you want to compare price, durability, or something else, it lets you explore each of these topics. All in one click, right from position zero, without even visiting the page the answer comes from: clicking a topic expands the answer.

Opportunity or Threat for SEO?

Like regular featured snippets, topic-based snippets offer visibility that standard results don’t get. It’s better to be there than to see a competitor there, especially since position zero signals authority to many searchers.

But while they’re great for visibility, featured snippets also encourage people to stay on Google instead of clicking through to the sites behind them. If searchers can get their answers directly on the results page, why visit the page the answer came from? Featured snippets save searchers time, but they can cost websites a significant number of sessions, a trend that later fueled the zero-click search debate.

Want to improve your chances of landing in position zero? There’s no magic formula, but we recommend structuring your content clearly (descriptive headings, concise answers, lists, and tables) so search engines can understand it easily. Our SEO content writing tips show how to do that in practice.

If, on the other hand, you don’t want to appear in featured snippets, you can add the following tag to the head of your page: <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">. It tells Google’s crawlers not to show a snippet for that page.

Where Things Stand in 2026

In January 2020, Google stopped repeating a featured snippet’s URL in the regular organic listings on page one, which raised the stakes of holding position zero. In September 2019, it added finer controls such as max-snippet and data-nosnippet. And since May 2024, AI Overviews have appeared at the top of many U.S. results, adding another answer format alongside featured snippets. Our guide to optimizing for Google AI Overviews covers what that means today.