Snippet controls

How do snippet controls work?#

Snippet controls work as robots rules in a meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header — nosnippet and max-snippet:[n] apply to the whole page — or as a data-nosnippet attribute on individual elements, telling search engines how much text they may show or quote from that page.

<!-- No text snippet anywhere, and no input to AI Overviews or AI Mode -->
<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">
 
<!-- Cap snippets and AI input at 150 characters -->
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:150">
 
<!-- Let Google choose the snippet length and allow large image previews -->
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large">
 
<!-- Keep one passage out while the rest of the page stays quotable -->
<p>Plans start at $29 a month.</p>
<div data-nosnippet>Enterprise pricing is negotiated per contract.</div>

# The same rules as response headers, for PDFs and other non-HTML files
X-Robots-Tag: nosnippet
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot: max-snippet:150

• The strictest rule wins. If a page carries both max-snippet:50 and nosnippet, Google applies nosnippet.
• data-nosnippet works only on span, div and section elements, and an unclosed element hides everything after it. Don’t add or remove it with JavaScript: Google may read it before or after rendering.
• The crawler has to see the rule. A page blocked in robots.txt never has its meta tags read, so its snippet rules are ignored.
• The same rules govern featured snippets. nosnippet or data-nosnippet keeps text out of them; a low max-snippet alone doesn’t guarantee it.

Do snippet controls affect AI Overviews and AI Mode?#

Snippet controls directly govern Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode: nosnippet stops a page being used as a direct input to them, max-snippet limits how much they may use, and data-nosnippet removes a passage. Google also requires a page to be snippet-eligible before it can appear as a supporting link at all.

Google’s robots meta specification names the AI features outright. nosnippet “applies to all forms of search results (at Google: web search, Google Images, Discover, AI Overviews, AI Mode) and will also prevent the content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode.” max-snippet “will also limit how much of the content may be used as a direct input” to both.

How do you opt out of AI Overviews without leaving Google Search?#

To opt out of AI Overviews without leaving Google Search, set Search Console’s Search generative AI setting to Exclude, which since 31 August 2026 removes a property from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s AI features while leaving regular results untouched. nosnippet also works, but strips your snippets everywhere.

Google’s caveat applies to all of them: the crawler has to see the change, and recrawling “can take anywhere from several days to several months.” Check what Googlebot received with URL Inspection in Search Console, and request a recrawl for pages that can’t wait. See Google-Extended for the Gemini side and AI Overviews for how the feature picks sources.

Do Bing, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity honor snippet controls?#

Bing has its own AI controls — noarchive keeps a page out of its AI chat answers and nocache limits them to the URL, title and snippet — while OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity document no snippet controls at all; for them, the levers are robots.txt and noindex.

Bing announced its two controls in September 2023 for what was then Bing Chat. Note the split with Google, whose robots specification lists noarchive and nocache among rules it no longer uses — so a single robots meta tag can mean different things to different engines. For the AI engines with no snippet controls, crawler access is the real switch: see AI crawlers.

Common mistakes with snippet controls#

The most common snippet control mistakes are a nosnippet or tiny max-snippet left in a site-wide template, blocking a page in robots.txt so its rules are never read, relying on Google-Extended to leave AI Overviews, and wrapping so much in data-nosnippet that nothing quotable is left.

Related terms#

• AI search & GEOAI OverviewsAI-generated summaries shown at the top of some Google search results, written by a Gemini model from pages in Google’s search index and linked to their sources — so they are won through ordinary Google eligibility, not a separate submission or special markup.Read the entry
• AI crawlersGoogle-ExtendedA robots.txt product token, not a separate crawler, that lets site owners stop Google from using their content to train Gemini models and to ground answers in the Gemini app, without affecting Google Search — including AI Overviews and AI Mode.Read the entry
• Content & relevanceFeatured snippetA highlighted excerpt Google shows at the top of some results to answer the query directly, lifted from one ranking page and credited with a link — the original answer-extraction format and the direct forerunner of AI Overviews.Read the entry
• AI crawlersrobots.txtA plain-text file at a site’s root that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch, rule by rule for each user agent — a voluntary standard that reputable search and AI bots follow, which controls crawling but not whether a URL gets indexed.Read the entry
• AI search & GEOAI ModeA conversational search experience inside Google Search that answers complex questions with a generated response built from many parallel sub-searches and supports follow-up questions, rather than summarizing above the classic results as AI Overviews do.Read the entry
• GSCMeasurementGoogle Search ConsoleGoogle’s free tool for site owners that reports how a site performs in Google Search — queries, impressions, clicks, position and indexing — and since 2026 it also reports impressions in Google’s generative AI features and lets owners opt out of them.Read the entry