Featured snippet expected behavior when content changes often

Search Search - Search Quality Recommendations & Trouble
1

Hi y’all, I have a couple of Search detail Qs in regards to featured snippets + training data:
What happens with featured snippets if a client changes the content a lot?

  • Do they get removed if the snippet txt itself has been modified?

  • Does this apply when snippets are set to “approve only”?

  • If they get removed, I assume the client has to reapprove them if on “approve only”, correct?

  • Do they get removed or stay if txt outside the snippet has been modified?

  • If they get removed, I assume they have to reapproved if on “approve only”, correct?

  • How can a “approve only” client find out which queries “lost” their snippets?

  • If snippets don’t get removed and stay as they are, how can a client find out which snippets might be outdated due to the changes they made?

Use Case: A client modifies/updates their content (thousands of help articles) several hundred times a week and we ingest the data via API. As of today featured snippets are on “approve only” as they want to have control over what their customers see. But of course they want to avoid + can’t handle reapproving the same featured snippets again and again on a regular basis.

I did some testing in a sandbox account but didn’t see consistent behavior (most of the snippets got removed but some stayed as they were, even with a small change in the snippet txt itself ) so it would be nice to get the expected behavior for both “approve only” and “allow all” confirmed.

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi Hauke,

Answering your questions in order:

  • If the content around the snippet changes, the “override” in experience training won’t apply anymore. But if you add content elsewhere - like for example if you added a paragraph to the end, but left the original part the same - then the override would still be valid.
  • Yeah, the Prediction Mode doesn’t change this behavior
  • That’s right. If your Knowledge Graph content changes, you will need to re-approve or re-reject any new featured snippets that appear from that content.
  • Right now we don’t have a great way to identify “lost” snippets (i.e. snippets that were created on an entity that has since changed). But we are considering adding a way to see this

Best,
Max

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