Can an SEO company optimize for featured snippets?
Yes, in the sense of making a page a strong candidate; no one can make Google choose it. A featured snippet reverses the usual result format, showing a passage from the page first so it answers the search directly. A company can find the searches where your pages are close, structure the answer so it is easy to lift, and track what happens. It cannot mark a page as a featured snippet, and it should also know how to keep a page out of snippets if that is what you want.
What Google says you can and cannot do
Google’s page on featured snippets and your website answers the question of how to mark a page as a featured snippet with: “You can’t. Google systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet for a user’s search request, and if so, elevates it.” The same page says Google does not provide an exact minimum length for a featured snippet, because it varies with the information, the language, and the device. So any fixed word count promised for snippet answers is a rule of thumb, not Google’s.
Choosing where to try
The company starts with searches that already show a featured snippet and where your page already appears on the first page of results, since those are the pages Google is already treating as relevant. For each, it reads the current snippet: what question it answers, in what format, and what it leaves out. The target list is the set of questions where your page can give a clearer, more accurate answer than the one shown.
Structuring the answer
The answer should sit directly under a heading that states the question, in plain words, before any background. Definitions suit a short paragraph; steps suit a numbered list built with real list markup; comparisons suit a table with clear column headings. Real list and table markup states the structure in the page’s code; text styled to look like a list does not. The rest of the page then gives the detail the snippet cannot hold, which is what a searcher who clicks is looking for.
Opting out
Some businesses prefer not to appear in featured snippets, for example when a snippet gives away an answer they would rather people click through to read. The same Google page explains that the nosnippet rule blocks all snippets for a page, that text marked with the data-nosnippet attribute is excluded from both featured and regular snippets, and that lowering the max-snippet setting makes a featured snippet less likely. It also warns that a low max-snippet setting does not guarantee that featured snippets stop; the guaranteed route is nosnippet.
AI Overviews
Google says no additional requirements or special optimizations are needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond its general SEO guidance. Its page on AI features also notes that “AI Overviews are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often don’t trigger.” A clear, well-structured answer serves both the featured snippet and any AI summary that may cite the page, but neither appearance can be promised.