Featured Snippets Results in Google Web Search: An Exploratory Study
This study provides insights into how featured snippets are generated in web search, which is useful for SEO practitioners and researchers, but it is incremental as it focuses on exploratory analysis without proposing new methods.
The authors analyzed 163,412 keywords and featured snippets from the Polish Google search engine, finding that 48% of featured snippets are taken from the top-ranked result and that they often come from trustworthy sources like Wikipedia, primarily in paragraph form.
In this paper authors analyzed 163412 keywords and results with featured snippets collected from localized Polish Google search engine. A method-ology for retrieving data from Google search engine was proposed in terms of obtaining necessary data to study featured snippets. It was observed that almost half of featured snippets (48%) is taken from result on first ranking position. Furthermore, some correlations between prepositions and the most often appearing content words in keywords was discovered. Results show that featured snippets are often taken from trustworthy websites like e.g., Wikipedia and are mainly presented in form of a paragraph. Paragraph can be read by Google Assistant or Home Assistant with voice search. We conclude our findings with discussion and research limitations.