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Ask Google a question and it often pulls a paragraph, list or table straight out of a ranking page and displays it in a box at the top. The box carries the source page's title and link, which is why the nickname position zero stuck. Sites chase it because it takes the first thing a searcher reads. The trade is real, since some searchers get their answer in the box and never click through. Winning one is a formatting job as much as a ranking job: Google needs a clean, self-contained passage that answers the question directly, sitting under a heading that matches it.