Featured Snippet
A featured snippet is a highlighted extract from a web page that Google displays above the classic organic search results, in order to answer a query directly with text, a list or a table taken from a single source.
In practice
Whether a page appears as a featured snippet is decided automatically by Google; there is no markup that requests one. In practice it still pays to phrase typical questions as subheadings, put the answer compactly in the first paragraph and mark up lists and tables cleanly – so that Google finds a clearly delimited answer section at all. The same structure also favours citations in AI answer systems, which is why featured snippets are seen as the forerunner of today's AEO practices.