What Is the Difference Between a Featured Snippet and an AI Overview?

A featured snippet pulls one exact passage, word for word, from a single ranking page and displays it in a box above the results. An AI Overview works differently, generating an entirely new summary written by AI, often blending facts from several different pages.

That difference matters for how each gets built. Winning a featured snippet is about having the single cleanest, most extractable answer on the page. An AI Overview citation is about being one of several sources the model trusts enough to draw from.

Both still reward the same underlying habits: a direct answer, clear structure, and accurate, specific information near the top of the page.

Writing for both formats at once is standard practice inside LLM SEO software.