Maybe the term is (too) long? Or too generic?

What doesn’t make sense, though, is that the exact phrase that I searched for is in the first paragraph of the page’s text, as well as in the head’s description field. The search term does show up under our listing, but not in the callout.

Sometimes text on the page can be extracted and highlighted matching the query of the searcher. Sometimes the phrase isn’t there; the words are, but not the phrase. That’s one of the many reasons why a snippet wouldn’t be highlighted.

As with regular snipper generation, there is no real control you have over it: the snippet it makes for the query “cheap blue widget” will be different from the one for “how to make tea”

The snippet is generated automatically, similar to how it goes in the search results pages themselves. It is picked based on what the searcher is looking for and the text on the page.

Google doesn’t provide for a way to suggest highlight sections.

This news led me to a reorganisation of my pages that meant an improvement anyway, part from the highlight feature.
But waht I do not understand is how Google selects the search terms for In-screenshot highlighting of search terms.Is there a way to tell Google where to look?

The reports that the previews count for traffic stem from the fact that Google creates some previews on the fly so that if you use the preview function and then check your server log you would see a Google bot come in to fetch the page and related files.

It’s important to note however that even that doesn’t mean the preview was viewed: when a user clicks one magnifier to get a preview, Google preloads all other previews on the page — among which may have been the one you saw.

Re. the images, the site in question had images on-site but also preview also shows offsite images. Not sure what goes wrong in those cases.

Good call on how this could impact SEO in a visual manner!

The previews will not count for your traffic, no. And if people click on them to go through to your site there is no way (yet?) to track if they come from a regular Google click or a preview click

I was surprised by Google’s own low percentage quotes. Google doesn’t mess with their search page for fun so one wonders what the *real* strategy behind this is.