featured-snippet-passageslisted

# Extractable Passages Every answer surface — featured snippets, People Also Ask, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude — works the same way. A system finds a passage that answers a question, lifts it out of the page, and presents it on its own. So the unit of optimisation isn't the page. It's the passage. The question is whether any 40 to 60 word block on your page can be removed from its context and still answer the question completely. Almost no writing does this naturally, because good prose builds. Extractable prose front-loads. ## The core pattern ``` ## [The question, phrased the way a person asks it] [Direct answer, 40-60 words, complete on its own, no pronouns pointing at earlier text, no "as mentioned above", includes the subject of the question by name.] [Then the expansion: why, how, exceptions, evidence, examples.] ``` That's the whole technique. What makes it hard is discipline, because the instinct is to set up before answering. **Before** > Understanding email authentication can be complex. There are several protocols involved, and they interact in ways that trip people up. Once you've grasped how they relate to each other, the picture becomes clearer. SPF, for its part, is one of these. **After** > ## What is SPF? > > SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a DNS record listing which mail servers are allowed to send email for your domain. Receiving servers check it against the sending server's IP address. If the IP isn't l