Where on the page should the direct answer sit for AI extraction?
- Published November 6, 2026
- Linked from 3 answers
- In a cluster of 63
At the top of the page for the main question, and immediately under each heading for the questions inside it, written so the sentence still makes sense on its own. Google does not publish a placement rule for AI features; its documentation says there are no special optimizations beyond Search’s own requirements. The placement advice is editorial: an answer at the start of its section is easy for a reader to find, and a sentence that names its subject can be quoted without the paragraphs before it.
Two parts: position and self-containment
| Placement | Example | Works because |
|---|---|---|
| First paragraph answers the title | "A 301 redirect is permanent; a 302 is temporary, and Google treats only the permanent one as a signal that the target should be canonical." | The page's main question is settled before anything else |
| Each section opens with its answer | Under "How long does a migration take?": "For a medium-sized site, Google's site move guidance puts the switch from old to new URLs at a few weeks or more." | The heading and its answer sit together |
| Detail follows | Conditions, exceptions, examples below the answer | The reader who needs more keeps reading |
Self-containment is the part pages miss. “It takes longer than that” means nothing out of context; “Moving a large site can take longer than a few weeks” carries its own subject. Read each section’s first sentence alone; if it answers the heading, it is in the right shape.
Placements that hide the answer
- Do not withhold the answer to keep people scrolling. Readers who cannot find it leave, and a summary that cannot find it may draw on another page instead; that is a reasonable expectation, not a documented rule.
- Do not put the answer only in an image, a video, or a collapsed element that loads on click; Google indexes text that is in the page, and content that needs an interaction to load may not be seen.
- Do not stamp a separate “answer box” on pages that have no single answer; for that case, see whether to add a direct-answer block to every page.
Checking a page
Skim only the first sentence of the page and of each section. Together they should read as a short, accurate version of the page. Where a first sentence is a scene-setting line, swap it with the sentence that actually answers, and keep the scene-setting after it.
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