First, update the map, because the two features had opposite years.

Featured snippets are being replaced, not demoted. Ahrefs data shows snippet presence on desktop fell 64 percent, from 15.41 percent of SERPs in January 2025 to 5.53 percent by June, as Google routed those queries to AI Overviews. Co-occurrence of snippets and Overviews dropped from 34 to 18 percent: Google shows one or the other.

People Also Ask went the other way. PAA appears on 64.9 percent of searches, and when an AI Overview shows up, PAA is the one feature that survives, while sitelinks, video carousels and knowledge panels get displaced at 75 to 96 percent rates.

So the strategy splits cleanly in two.

For snippets, fish where the AI is not. Overviews concentrate on complex informational queries; snippets still fire on straightforward, commercial and transactional searches, which is where the click value lives anyway. A snippet in position one still earns around a 42.9 percent CTR, and unlike an Overview, a snippet has one source, so the clicks are not split.

Find these by checking your money queries manually: where no Overview appears, snippet formatting is the highest-leverage work left on the page.

Most rank trackers now flag which SERP features each keyword triggers, so this audit can run automatically once you have done it by hand a single time. The manual pass still matters first, because feature data lags and Overviews change by week.

The formatting itself has not changed. Answer the question in 40 to 60 words directly under a heading that matches the query. Use a numbered list for processes, a table for comparisons, and define the term before elaborating. This is the structure-and-readability discipline that machines have always rewarded.

For PAA, treat the box as a permanent surface, not a consolation prize. Pull the PAA questions for your target query, make them your H2s, and answer each in the first sentence beneath. Because PAA persists next to Overviews, this is visibility that survives the AI layer on 6 in 10 searches.

Now the part that makes both worth more than their own clicks: snippet-formatted content is the feeder system for AI citations. Research finds pages that previously held featured snippets are disproportionately the pages cited in AI Overviews. You are not optimizing for a dying feature; you are training your content to be the quotable passage, which is exactly how citation gets won and where the remaining clicks concentrate.

The workflow, monthly. List your top 50 non-branded queries. Mark which show an Overview, a snippet, or both. Where a snippet shows without an Overview, apply the formatting and take it. Where an Overview shows, target its PAA questions and citation slot instead of the snippet that is no longer there. Track which features you hold, since displacement is ongoing.

The straight answer: you win snippets by picking the queries AI skipped, you win PAA everywhere by answering questions in their own words, and both jobs use one skill, which is writing the cleanest liftable answer on the internet for that question.