https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.seroundtable.com/google-robot-in-featured-spotlight-1692794854.jpg

Google\'s John Mueller said there is no rule that a page has to rank in the top ten search result positions for it to be considered eligible for a featured snippet position.

The question was asked by Shubham Davey who wrote "if a page isn\'t ranking in the top 10 on SERPs, are those pages eligible for featured snippets?"

John Mueller replied on Twitter

Here are those tweets:

@dannysullivan, What happens before a page starts ranking for featured snippets? Do they rank on page #1 first & then move to position 0?
Or pages from any position (even page #2 & beyond) on SERPs can rank for featured snippets?

— Shubham Davey (@bydaveyji) August 22, 2023

I didn\'t read the link, but I don\'t think there\'s any hard rule like that; that would be weird.

— John Mueller (official) · #MaybeABot (@JohnMu) August 22, 2023

Pete Meyers from Moz also added his thoughts:

I did a study to try to replicate this after, but it\'s 1-1/2 years old and involved measuring something we can\'t observe without connecting SERPs across days (i.e. it\'s complicated) -- https://t.co/kLAei9CdGU

— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) August 22, 2023

While it doesn\'t have to be the case where a featured snippet must be from a page that would rank well, it probably is mostly the case.

Forum discussion at Twitter.