Featured snippets , i.e. a highlighted search result at the beginning of the SERP, are a guarantee for a high level of attention and click-through-rate in the search results. Google has announced changes.
Google will now use its current AI model – “Multitask Unified Model (MUM)” – to check featured snippets that are displayed and mark them with a concise and bold answer, when this answer corresponds to the consensus of other, reliable results.
In the future, this highlighting will only be displayed if other sources with high “expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness” also provide the result. The AI does not need the exact same formulation and understands general concepts.
From the point of view of Google users, this is a good and important step forward – especially because many users do not question the information from Google, but rather take it as the truth.
From the SEO perspective, the change looks more problematic. It’s not difficult to imagine that Google, with a little more experience and confidence in the result, would switch these results from featured snippets to direct answers – causing the naming of a source, including a link and traffic, to fall away completely.
