It seems Google is showing more featured snippets for more queries than they have even done before. Both RankRanger and Mozcast show a significant uptick in the percentage of queries that Google is showing these featured snippets.

Featured snippets are when Google grabs content from a web site, extracts the information and answers the searcher right at the top of the page, so the searcher doesn’t need to click over to the web page and leave Google.

Here are charts from RankRanger and Mozcast showing the increase in feature snippets in the past 30 days:

What is interesting is that Google did tell us that they deployed new machine learning sentence compression to power these featured snippets last month – but maybe it didn’t really kick in until now?

In any event, it seems Google really bumped up the featured snippets – most likely because of Google Home and Google Assistant being more widely used by folks.

Forum discussion at Twitter.