Surveying the Featured Snippets

Paulina Zacharias

(Author)

Published: 13.07.2017

Looking at our list of domains with the most featured snippets we see the Wikipedia as the clear winner. What makes this list so interesting are those domains that make the cut even though they are not within the list of most Visible domains on google.co.uk. Let’s take a closer look at the data.

To get a good overview of how many Featured Snippets we are talking about for the Wikipedia, we added a small excerpt of the Featured Snippets in different Google country indexes.

Amount of Featured Snippets in different google country indexes

Top 100 Domains With the Most Featured Snippets

Now we get to the main question of which domains managed to join Wikipedia on the list of the 100 domains with the most Featured Snippets? The following list has the answer for google.co.uk:

It is interesting to see that no travel related website manages to break into the Top 100 – while there are a few on google.de (please see our German blogpost “Die Vermessung von Featured Snippets” for all the data).

Best Practice: Top 10 Domains by Featured Snippet Categories

Which are the most successful domains? For this question it is quite useful to look at the Top 10 domains for each Featured Snippet category: Text, Video, Lists and Tables.

It becomes quickly apparent that health related topics seem to make for a lot of textual Featured Snippets in the UK. And Wikipedia overlooks everything with close to twice as many text snippets as the rest of the Top 10 combined.

When it comes to videos the Guardian pretty much rates a poor second after Youtube which takes home 99.99% of these Featured Snippets.

Wikipedia has to take a backseat to wikihow.com and it seems that receipies and health topics make for good lists. Especially interesting is the result for allrecipes.com which has “just” 24,64 Visibility points, making it a domain that will not show up in the most visible domains for google.co.uk.

Featured Snippets and Topical Clusters

If we cluster the data by topics and look only at the averages, then outliers can have a large impact on the results. For this reason we also included the median values in this table:

Wikipedia makes for the huge average for encyclopedias and Youtube does the same for videos. The larger clusters such as Computers, Finance and Cooking show a pretty even spread.

Conclusion

Google has not yet let anyone in on their secret of how to get a Featured Snippet but knowing which domains already have them is of great help. With this knowledge you can try to find keyword opportunities where you might want to try to create a better featured snippet or evaluate those of other domain in order to create your own hypothesis of how and when Google decides to show one.