What featured snippets are, why you can't claim one, and how to opt out

A normal Google result leads with the page title and link, and puts a short description underneath. A featured snippet reverses that order. The descriptive text comes first, in its own box, and the source page follows. Google's example is a search for how to boil an egg, answered with 7 to 10 minutes.

Featured snippets also show up inside the group of related questions Google calls People also ask.

Google's documentation answers this directly: you can't mark up a page to make it a featured snippet. Google's systems decide which pages would work well as a featured snippet for a given search and promote them. No tag, schema type or setting makes a page eligible.

There are two routes. To block every snippet for a page, featured and normal, add the nosnippet rule. Any text marked with the data-nosnippet HTML attribute is also kept out of both kinds of snippet. If a page uses both nosnippet and data-nosnippet, nosnippet wins and the page shows no snippet at all.

To keep normal snippets but stay out of featured ones, try lower values for the max-snippet rule. A featured snippet only appears when enough text can be shown to make it useful, so a lower value makes one less likely.

Google doesn't publish an exact minimum length, because the threshold depends on the snippet content, the language and the platform, whether mobile, app or desktop. If pages still appear, lower the value further. A low max-snippet value doesn't promise anything, though, and Google says to use nosnippet when you need a certain result.

When someone clicks a featured snippet, Google sends them straight to the part of the page the snippet came from and scrolls there automatically. The site doesn't need to add anything for this to work. If the browser doesn't support the underlying technology, or Google can't tell exactly which part of the page to target, the click opens the top of the page instead.