Google has been observed extracting content from PDFs to generate featured snippets.
Kevin Indig noted on Twitter that Google is now using PDFs for featured snippets.
This marks the first instance of such a phenomenon. Traditionally, Google has extracted content from websites to create featured snippets.
I was able to replicate this myself, even with the same query shown in the screenshot.
It probably varies between users, based on what Google deems most relevant to the individual.
### What Does This Mean for SEOs?
The key takeaway for SEOs is that PDFs can now achieve featured snippet placement, also known as “position zero.”
This implies that the same best practices used for optimizing web content for featured snippets may now apply to PDFs.
You can learn more about optimizing for zero-click searches in a recent SEJ article.
From the article:
“…featured snippets are usually won by those pages already ranking on Page 1. So, improving upon your previous ranking success is still vital.”
To enhance the ranking success of PDFs, consider these 10 tips for making your PDFs SEO-friendly.
From the article:
“Optimizing PDFs for SEO, however, remains a largely untapped opportunity. Google can crawl, index, and rank the documents, but simple best practices are often under-utilized or just unknown.”
Now that PDFs can appear in featured snippets, more optimization of PDFs is likely in the future.
Here are additional insights from the SEO community shared on Twitter:
Tyron Love mentioned noticing a PDF version of an article overtaking the HTML article, which might be a user experience issue on mobile devices.
Rich Tatum pointed out that case studies and PDF whitepapers can now achieve position zero, suggesting that in-house SEO teams may now need to optimize PDFs for search.
Evan Yule shared that it is easier to target competitors’ PDFs with answer boxes, which has been a successful strategy over the past few months.
Jason Peck expressed mixed feelings, acknowledging potential opportunities while questioning if this development is truly beneficial for users or the internet overall.
### More Resources
