I have noticed in the past few months that traffic to the QA section of my site has plummeted. The vast amount of the 300+ pages here rank quite well in Google and I am not doing anything to cheat the system. I decided to do a few searches and I have found that almost every page is now the featured snippet for the search result and the answer to most of the questions are featured in the snippet, meaning the user never needs to visit my site.
I can understand how this benefits the user, but how does it benefit me, the person who is putting time and effort into publishing the content?
Is there a way to prevent Google from using snippets from my website in this way? Is there even any legal grounds to this? If I were to take "snippets" from other websites that gave the user the answer they needed, I would likely get hit with a copyright notice for plagiarism.