Google: Structured Data Not Currently Used For Featured Snippets

Earlier this month, we reported Google's John Mueller saying that schema helps with featured snippets. That using schema or structured markup can help Google understand your content and ultimately help you get in the featured snippets box.

However, if you looked at the actually featured snippets, very few, if any, actually had schema or structured data markup on the page. This is why I covered John saying that because it did not seem true. But it may be John saying that it might be true in the future.

Last night at the State of Search conference, Gary Illyes of Google said it clearly that Google does not take into account schema for featured snippets, not yet at least. There were several tweets from the audience of Gary saying this, here is one:

Featured snippets don't take structured data into account at all right now, according to @methode. #StateofSearch

— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) November 16, 2015

Many also added that this may change in the future but right now, Google doesn't pay attention to schema for featured snippet purposes.

So why did John Mueller say that earlier? Maybe because Google will be looking at it in the future?

Forum discussion at Twitter.