Google Tests Featured Snippet With Google Hosted Content With Publisher Info Hidden in Hover Over Modal Window

Google used to show auto-generated AMP stories for celebrities, animals, etc and now it appears they are using those content for featured snippets and publishers who created these content are getting restricted to being shown as modals that gets activated on hover.

If you look at these google.com/search/static/ pages there are quite a few of them and I hate to think when these will become the standard featured snippet answers in the SERP.

Hmm. Not liking where this is headed. For the most part, Google is very careful with the content they're "repurposing" in AMP Stories. Here's an example where they've produced a Featured Snippet with content from other sites, with sources included. pic.twitter.com/JStaObCCGO

— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) November 23, 2020

Update 26/11/2020:

Google has confirmed that it was unintentional that Google was showing Google-generated web stories as featured snippets and thus decided to 404 those results. Google does not want to show autogenerated Google web stories in the featured snippets . Google has thus decided to block these pages from being indexed.