SEO strategies are designed to help websites rank at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). While featured snippets have provided businesses with a way to rank even higher, AI Overviews have recently emerged as a new feature that may change the SEO landscape.
Featured snippets are short chunks of text taken directly from a website and highlighted on SERPs.They are often short definitions or answers to questions and can be formatted as a short paragraph, a list, or a table. At Outpace SEO, one of our SEO strategies includes optimizing and creating content more likely to rank in featured snippets because it can provide websites with significant advantages. Featured snippets used to sit in what was referred to as "position zero."
However, in May 2024, Google launched AI Overviews. While Google still displays featured snippets, now, it also displays an AI-generated answer to many search queries. This answer is usually displayed at the very top of the SERP. It is not direct text pulled from one website, but a summary generated from multiple sources -- usually websites that rank on the first page. This change left many people wondering whether featured snippets were still significant.