Google Tests Featured Snippets Anchors & Highlights On Desktop

Google has a feature on mobile, where if a featured snippet leads to an AMP page, Google can take the searcher after they click on the snippet to your AMP page, anchor them down to the section of the content the searcher wants to see and highlight that content in yellow. Well, Google is now testing that on desktop.

Glenn Gabe documented this, as he is in the test, on Twitter:

So you see the featured snippet:

You click on it and it loads the page, anchors you down and highlights the content:

Here are more examples:

Here’s another example, this time for a health/medical query. Google is jumping you down the page to the exact text ON DESKTOP using the targetText functionality that they have been working on (which can allow you to jump anyone down the page via a link to specific text). pic.twitter.com/suKPh26LWJ

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 23, 2019

And here’s one that went very wrong for some reason. Check out how much highlighted text there is on the page! Not sure how helpful that is for users after clicking a featured snippet. That said, most work very well. I’ll keep the test window open and keep trying queries. ???? pic.twitter.com/jdcQpQWQQP

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 23, 2019

I had to check one of my featured snippets out. For “what are untrackable clicks?”, Google is jumping me down the page and highlighting the text (again, ON DESKTOP). This was only being done for AMP on mobile. I’m in a test where G is doing this for dtop via targetText in Chrome. pic.twitter.com/zfYKfr3iUa

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 23, 2019

This is not loading the AMP version of the site to do this. As Glenn said, it is using the targetText Chrome functionality to make this happen:

And for anyone interested in targetText Chrome functionality, here’s the explainer document from February. I cannot force this in my test browser window, but Google is using it to jump users to a specific part of the text (and highlight that text). https://t.co/gMOkqqhAVe pic.twitter.com/v2qwwjPZy7

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 23, 2019

Note, this does not mean Google is indexing content on a page separately, this is just a user interface experience. Google does not index parts of a page independently.

Forum discussion at Twitter.