Google Search Featured Snippets highlighting answers on linked AMP articles

Abner Li | Dec 30 2018 - 12:03 pm PT

Featured Snippets in Google Search provide users with direct answers and are leveraged during voice queries on Assistant and Home speakers. On the web, Google sometimes shows videos queued to the relevant timestamp and is now directly highlighting answers on AMP articles when users click-through to the full answer.

With Feature Snippets, users can quickly see an answer to some questions at the top of Search. Google finds the relevant portion of an article and displays it as the first result in its own highlighted box. An accompanying image is occasionally displayed along with the link to the page where the full answer resides.

If the Featured Snippet links to an AMP article, Google will sometimes automatically scroll users to that section and highlight the answer in orange. This helps to display the answer in context and is useful on long pages. Besides the highlighted text, a snack bar at the bottom of the window tells users that they are “Scrolled to section” and provides a “Go to top” shortcut. The highlight and snack bar automatically disappears after a few seconds.

At the moment, the type of questions that offer this AMP highlight is limited to shorter queries that can be directly answered, like “what is [x].” For example, long multi-step “how do you do [x]” will not provide a resulting markup. We’ve only found highlights when searching for the questions seen in the screenshots.

Meanwhile, this only works on mobile given that the markup aspect appears to require some integration with Accelerated Mobile Pages.

This feature appears to be widely rolled out in regards to the highlights appearing on several devices for the above queries, but again it’s not clear what exact questions will invoke this AMP markup.

More about AMP and Featured Snippets:

Thanks Sumanth

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