A featured snippet is a short answer Google pulls directly from a ranking page and displays above the normal organic results, in the slot often called "position zero" because it sits ahead of even the top-ranking result. Google extracts the text automatically; there's no separate submission process, only the ordinary page content being judged as the clearest available answer to the query.
Featured snippets tend to appear for questions with a fairly direct answer: definitions, steps, comparisons, lists. Content structured to answer that kind of question clearly, a concise definition near the top, a numbered list for a process, a short direct sentence answering a "what is" query, has a better shot at being pulled into the snippet than content that buries the answer in a long lead-up. The tradeoff cuts both ways: winning the snippet can lift visibility and click-through rate, but for queries with a genuinely short answer, showing it directly on the results page satisfies plenty of searchers who never click through at all, sometimes called a zero-click search.
