Google may display a short passage, list, or table from a page in a featured snippet and link to the source. Its systems select snippets automatically; a publisher cannot mark a page as a featured snippet.
Clear headings and direct answers make a page easier for people to scan, but no structure guarantees snippet selection. Google can change the excerpt or stop showing the feature for the query.
The same clarity can help other retrieval systems understand a passage, but a featured snippet and an AI citation are separate outcomes.
For a question such as "how often should a furnace be serviced," Google may show a short answer with a source link. That prominent excerpt is a featured snippet.
Go deeper: How to Get Your Business Cited by AI Search (2026).
This is part of the AI visibility work.