Snippet controls are directives that tell Google how much of a page it may quote or preview in search results. They are set in the robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag header, or with the data-nosnippet attribute on specific parts of the HTML. Google's documentation says these controls also apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, so they are the main lever a site has over whether its text is used as a direct input to those answers. The cost is that a page with no snippet is a less attractive result and loses eligibility for features that depend on one.
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The directives
Each directive can go in a meta tag for one page, in a header for files or whole sections, or be aimed at a single crawler such as googlebot.
- nosnippet: show no text snippet or video preview for the page
- max-snippet:[number]: limit text snippets to that many characters; 0 means none, -1 means no limit
- data-nosnippet: an HTML attribute on span, div or section elements that keeps that text out of snippets
- max-image-preview:[none|standard|large]: the largest image preview allowed
- max-video-preview:[number]: the longest video preview in seconds
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:160, max-image-preview:large">
<p>Our plans start with a free tier.
<span data-nosnippet>Contract terms for enterprise customers are set per account.</span>
</p>Trade-offs for AI search
Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear in its generative AI features. Blocking snippets therefore keeps a page out of those answers as a supporting link, not just out of the quoted text. For most SaaS marketing pages that is the wrong trade: you want to be cited.
The controls are useful where a page holds text you do not want quoted out of context, such as legal terms, pricing exceptions or paywalled reports. They do not stop other AI products that ignore Google's directives, and they are separate from the Google-Extended token, which governs use for model training and grounding in some Gemini products, not Search.
Example
Keeping a pricing caveat out of quotes
A fictional billing platform, Ledgerline, finds search snippets quoting a line about legacy pricing that applies to a handful of old accounts. Wrapping that paragraph in data-nosnippet keeps it on the page for readers while stopping it from being lifted into snippets. The rest of the page stays eligible.
Common mistakes
Using nosnippet to win clicks
Hiding the snippet rarely makes people click more. It usually makes the result less useful and removes the page from AI answers.
Expecting it to work behind robots.txt
Google has to crawl the page to read the directive. A URL blocked in robots.txt can still appear, with no snippet controls applied.
Wrapping the whole page in data-nosnippet
Use nosnippet if you mean the whole page. data-nosnippet is for specific passages.
Frequently Asked Questions
Google does not describe it as a ranking signal, but a result with no description is less useful to searchers and cannot appear in features that need a snippet.
Yes. Google's robots meta tag documentation says nosnippet and max-snippet also apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Yes. Use name="googlebot" in the meta tag or prefix the directive with googlebot: in the X-Robots-Tag header.
Keep reading
- X-Robots-Tag: X-Robots-Tag is an HTTP response header that sends robots directives like noindex. It works for PDFs and other non-HTML files a meta tag cannot reach.
- Noindex: Noindex is a directive, set in a meta tag or HTTP header, that tells search engines not to include a page in their results.
- Meta Description: A meta description is an HTML summary of a page. Google sometimes shows it as the snippet under a search result; it does not directly affect rankings.
- Featured Snippet: A featured snippet is a highlighted excerpt from a web page that Google shows near the top of results to answer a query directly, with a link to the source.
- Crawl Budget: Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine is able and willing to crawl on a site in a given period.
- Crawl Stats Report: The Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console shows how Google crawls a site, including request volume, download size, response time, host status and response types.
- Crawl trap: A crawl trap is a part of a site that generates endless URLs, so crawlers waste time there instead of on your real pages.
- Critical CSS: Critical CSS is the minimal set of styles needed to render the visible top of a page, inlined in the HTML so the first paint does not wait on stylesheets.
