Featured snippet
A block at or near the top of Google's results that quotes an extracted answer from a page, with a link to the source.
ContentPassage indexingPassage-based ranking
Passage ranking
Google's ability to rank a page based on the relevance of a specific passage within it, even when the page overall is about something broader.
In full
Announced in 2020 and rolled out from 2021, passage ranking helps long pages surface for narrow questions buried inside them. It is not a separate index of passages: whole pages still rank, but an individual section can be the reason. The practical implication is structural — clear headings, self-contained sections and direct answers make it likelier a passage is identified, which is the same discipline that helps snippet and generative extraction.
Example
A 6,000-word guide to boiler maintenance ranks for 'why is my boiler pressure dropping' on the strength of one clearly headed section.
Related terms
Heading structure (H1-H6)
The hierarchy of HTML heading elements that conveys a document's outline to users, assistive technology and parsers.
Semantic chunking
Splitting documents along meaning boundaries — sections, topics, complete ideas — rather than at fixed character counts, to produce…
Content brief
A specification given to a writer covering the target query set, intent, required subtopics, angle, sources, internal links and success…
Semantic search
Retrieval based on the meaning of a query and documents rather than literal keyword matching, using entities, context and learned…
Where to read more
- MS MARCO · Dataset · microsoft.github.io
- Passage Re-ranking with BERT · Landmark Post · arxiv.org