Someone from the search marketing community tweeted his surprise that Google ranked a paywalled web page in the featured snippets. Google’s official description of featured snippets precludes content that cannot be clicked through to be read.
But other documentation states that paywalled content is acceptable for Google Search as well as Google News. In addition to requirements for structured data that is missing, it’s unclear if this featured snippet is a mistake or if Google meant to do that.
I personally think paywalled content doesnt belong in @Google SERPs unless they’re marked, but I never realized they can even get featured snippets like this @Salem_Statesman content. pic.twitter.com/HfYu46gjO0
— Scott Hendison (@shendison) October 27, 2019
Honestly for all the work it is to get into a featured snippet, I feel like this is the best attempt to monetize it that I have personally seen 😀