Google Says Featured Snippets Don’t Have To Come From Top Ten Search Results

Google’s John Mueller said there is no rule that a page has to rank in the top ten search result positions for it to be considered eligible for a featured snippet position.

The question was asked by Shubham Davey who wrote “if a page isn’t ranking in the top 10 on SERPs, are those pages eligible for featured snippets?”

John Mueller replied on Twitter, “I don’t think there’s any hard rule like that; that would be weird.”

Here are those tweets:

@dannysullivan, What happens before a page starts ranking for featured snippets? Do they rank on page #1 first & then move to position 0?
Or pages from any position (even page #2 & beyond) on SERPs can rank for featured snippets?

— Shubham Davey (@bydaveyji) August 22, 2023

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I didn’t read the link, but I don’t think there’s any hard rule like that; that would be weird.

— John Mueller (official) · #MaybeABot (@JohnMu) August 22, 2023

Pete Meyers from Moz also added his thoughts:

I did a study to try to replicate this after, but it’s 1-1/2 years old and involved measuring something we can’t observe without connecting SERPs across days (i.e. it’s complicated) — https://t.co/kLAei9CdGU

— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) August 22, 2023

While it doesn’t have to be the case where a featured snippet must be from a page that would rank well, it probably is mostly the case.

Forum discussion at Twitter.