How to Control How Google Shows Your Content in AI Overviews and Snippets: nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet

What Are Snippet and Preview Controls?

Snippet and preview controls are rules — set in a robots meta tag, an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header or a data-nosnippet attribute — that tell a search engine how much of a page it may show as text, image or video previews in its results.

Google calls them “page- and text-level settings” that “adjust how Google presents your content in search results” (Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications, last updated March 24, 2026). As of October 2026, Google's descriptions of nosnippet and max-snippet name AI Overviews and AI Mode explicitly. They are different from robots.txt, which controls crawling; our guide on blocking or allowing AI crawlers in robots.txt covers that side.

What Google Says Controls Your Content in AI Overviews and AI Mode

Google's AI features and your website page (last updated December 10, 2025) names the controls directly:

“To limit the information shown from your pages in Search, use nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, or noindex controls.”

The same page says “robots.txt directives for Googlebot is the control for site owners to manage access to how their sites are crawled for Search”, because “AI is built into Search and integral to how Search functions”. It sets one eligibility rule that matters for every choice below: “To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet.”

None of these page-level rules removes a page from AI Overviews while leaving its ordinary snippet untouched; each also changes how the page appears in regular results. The AI-features-only option Google now documents works at site (property) level, in Search Console.

The Site-Level Option: Search Console's Search Generative AI Control

Search Console's Search generative AI control lets a site owner exclude a whole property from Google's generative AI features. Google's Search generative AI control help page says it manages “your site's inclusion in” AI Overviews, AI Mode and “Generative AI features in Google Discover”, and that “As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out this control to all websites worldwide.” Google announced it on June 3, 2026, first testing it with a subset of UK site owners (Google blog).

• Where: Settings > Search generative AI in Search Console. The choices are include (the default), exclude, or inherit the control from a parent property.
• What excluding does: “links to your site and your site's content won't appear in Search generative AI features”, and “You won't receive any traffic or impressions from these features.”
• Regular results: “this control isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search.”
• What it does not cover: “This control doesn't affect AI training”; Google points to Google-Extended for that, and to noindex to leave Google Search completely.
• Scope and timing: it is set per Search Console property, not per page; child properties inherit from their closest configured parent unless overridden. Google says exclusion “generally takes a few days”.

Use it when you want a whole site or section out of AI features but still in regular results; use the page-level rules in the steps below for individual pages or passages. Search Console's Generative AI performance report shows impressions from these features, which helps estimate what excluding would cost.

How to Control Snippets and AI Overviews at a Glance

Time: under an hour to add a tag; days to months for Google to recrawl (Google's range). Tools: template or server access, Search Console's URL Inspection tool, a terminal for checking headers. Cost: none. Skill level: beginner for meta tags; intermediate for server headers.

What You Need Before Starting

• A list of the pages or sections you want to limit, and the reason (licensing, paywall, sensitive text, preference).
• Access to the page <head>, your CMS's search settings, or your web server configuration.
• Confirmation that robots.txt does not disallow Googlebot from those URLs.
• A verified Search Console property, and Bing Webmaster Tools if Bing matters to you.
• Agreement from whoever owns traffic targets: these controls trade visibility for control (see what you give up).

Step 1: Decide What You Want to Limit

Choose the narrowest control that achieves your goal. Google's rules differ in scope:

Why: broader rules cost more visibility. Expected result: a written decision per page type. How to verify: each choice maps to a row above. Common mistake: using noindex when the goal was only to keep a passage out of previews.

Step 2: Add a Page-Level Robots Meta Tag

Add the rule to the page's <head>. Use name="robots" for all search engines or name="googlebot" for Google only; Google says it supports two user agent tokens in the meta tag, googlebot and googlebot-news, and “other values are ignored”.

<!-- No text snippet anywhere in Google Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode -->
<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">

<!-- Or: allow a short snippet of at most 50 characters -->
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:50">

<!-- Google only -->
<meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">

Why: Google lists these as the page-level controls for limiting what Search shows. Expected result: the tag is present in the HTML that the server sends. How to verify: view source on the live page (not just the CMS preview). Common mistake: setting both max-snippet and nosnippet and expecting the softer one to win; Google says “the more restrictive rule applies.”

Step 3: Exclude Specific Passages With data-nosnippet

Wrap only the text you want kept out of snippets in a span, div or section with the data-nosnippet attribute.

<p>This sentence can appear in a snippet.
<span data-nosnippet>This pricing detail should not.</span></p>

<section data-nosnippet>
  <p>Subscriber-only analysis.</p>
</section>

Why: the rest of the page stays eligible for snippets and therefore for AI Overviews supporting links. Expected result: marked text no longer appears in snippets after recrawl. How to verify: check the HTML is valid and every marked element is closed; Google warns an unclosed div “will include all content afterwards”. Common mistake: adding the attribute with JavaScript after load; Google says “do not add or remove the data-nosnippet attribute of existing nodes through JavaScript”, and it only works on span, div and section.

Step 4: Use X-Robots-Tag for Files and Site-Wide Rules

Send the rule as an HTTP header when you cannot edit HTML, such as PDFs and images, or when one rule should cover many URLs. Google says “Any rule that can be used in a robots meta tag can also be specified as an X-Robots-Tag.” Adapted from Google's examples:

# Apache (.htaccess or httpd.conf)
<Files ~ "\.pdf$">
  Header set X-Robots-Tag "nosnippet"
</Files>

# NGINX
location ~* \.pdf$ {
  add_header X-Robots-Tag "nosnippet";
}

Why: non-HTML files cannot carry a meta tag. Expected result: the response includes X-Robots-Tag: nosnippet. How to verify: run curl -I https://www.example.com/file.pdf and read the headers. Common mistake: a regular expression that matches more files than intended; test several URLs, including pages you did not mean to change.

Step 5: Set max-image-preview if Image Size Matters

Add max-image-preview:standard or none if you want to limit image previews. Google says without the rule it “may show an image preview of the default size”, and that large allows “A larger image preview, up to the width of the viewport”.

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:160, max-image-preview:standard">

Why: image and text limits are separate; max-snippet “does not affect image or video previews.” Expected result: a combined, comma-separated rule. How to verify: view source. Common mistake: assuming this rule controls images in AI Overviews; Google's description of max-image-preview lists web search, Google Images, Discover and Assistant, and does not mention AI Overviews.

Step 6: Keep the Page Crawlable by Googlebot

Check that robots.txt does not disallow the URLs that carry your rules. Google says “If a page is disallowed from crawling through the robots.txt file, then any information about indexing or serving rules will not be found and will therefore be ignored.”

Why: if Googlebot cannot fetch the page, it never sees its nosnippet. Expected result: Googlebot is allowed to fetch the page. How to verify: URL Inspection reports crawling allowed. Common mistake: blocking Google-Extended and assuming it covers AI Overviews. Google says Google-Extended manages use for “training future generations of Gemini models” and grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI, and “does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search” (Google's common crawlers, last updated July 14, 2026). Our explainer does blocking a crawler remove you from search? sets out which crawler blocks affect search.

Step 7: Add Bing's nocache or noarchive for Copilot

Add nocache or noarchive if you also want to limit how Bing uses the page in its AI answers. Google ignores both (“The nocache rule isn't used by Google Search”; noarchive is “no longer used by Google Search”), but Bing documents them as its AI controls. Bing's robots meta tags help page (read October 7, 2026) says:

When Bing introduced these controls in September 2023, it said content with either tag “will still appear in our search results” (Bing Webmaster Blog). Bing also supports nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and max-image-preview, and says any of its tags can be sent as X-Robots-Tag or addressed to name="bingbot".

<!-- Bing: show only URL, title and snippet in Copilot -->
<meta name="bingbot" content="nocache">

Why: Google's and Bing's AI controls are different tags. Expected result: one tag per engine, each doing what that engine documents. How to verify: inspect the URL in Bing Webmaster Tools. Common mistake: adding noarchive to a paywalled page expecting a link in Copilot; Bing's 2023 post recommended adding nocache alongside it for that case.

Step 8: Inspect the URL and Allow Time to Recrawl

Run the URL Inspection tool on a changed page and view the crawled HTML. Google's troubleshooting advice for preview controls is to “use the URL Inspection tool to see the HTML that Googlebot received while crawling the page” and to allow time, because “crawling can take anywhere from several days to several months”. You can request a recrawl.

Why: existing snippets and AI answers keep using the old version until Google recrawls. Expected result: the fetched HTML or response headers include your rule. How to verify: see below. Common mistake: judging success the same day.

How to Verify It Worked

• Source and headers: view source shows the meta tag; curl -I shows any X-Robots-Tag header.
• URL Inspection: the HTML Googlebot received contains the rule, and crawling is allowed.
• Search results after recrawl: with nosnippet, the result shows no text snippet; with max-snippet, the snippet is no longer than the limit; with data-nosnippet, marked passages no longer appear.
• Search Console Performance report: Google says appearances in AI Overviews and AI Mode are “included in the overall search traffic” and reported “within the ‘Web’ search type”. Watch clicks and impressions for the changed pages.
• Bing: Bing Webmaster Tools URL Inspection shows the page; per Bing's documentation, Copilot answers should show only the URL, title and snippet (nocache) or no link (noarchive).

How to Choose a Control

For opt-out signals aimed at AI training more broadly, see can you tell an AI not to train on your site?

What You Give Up

Every page-level Google control that limits AI Overviews also limits regular search presentation, so expect less visibility (the site-level Search Console control is the exception, at the cost of all AI-feature traffic). Google's documents establish three costs:

• No supporting links. A page must be “eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet” to be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, so nosnippet or max-snippet:0 gives up those links.
• No featured snippets. Google says nosnippet blocks “all snippets (including featured snippets and regular snippets)”; a low max-snippet makes featured snippets less likely but “doesn't guarantee” they stop (Featured snippets).
• A bare blue link. A result without a text snippet tells searchers less about the page.

Whether AI Overviews take clicks you would otherwise get is a separate, disputed question; our data report on whether AI Overviews reduce clicks reviews the evidence. Google's own claim is that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are “higher quality”; it publishes no figure for that on the page.

One exception runs the other way: Google says robots meta limits “don't affect the use of” structured data (except article.description and other creative-work description values), and that max-snippet does not override permission granted through in-page structured data or a license agreement.

Common Problems and Fixes

What Not to Do

• Don't block Googlebot in robots.txt to keep out of AI Overviews. Consequence: you lose Google Search crawling, and Google cannot read any serving rule on those pages. Correction: use nosnippet or max-snippet, or the Search Console control for a whole site.
• Don't rely on Google-Extended for Search features. Google says it does not affect inclusion in Google Search. Correction: treat it as a Gemini training and grounding control only.
• Don't apply nosnippet site-wide by default. Consequence: every result loses its description and AI Overviews supporting-link eligibility. Correction: limit it to the pages or passages that need it.
• Don't use noindex when you only wanted shorter previews. Consequence: the page leaves search entirely. Correction: max-snippet.
• Don't expect noarchive or nocache to do anything at Google. Google lists both as unused. Correction: use them for Bing only.
• Don't inject preview rules with client-side JavaScript. Google warns rendering is not guaranteed. Correction: put rules in the server-rendered HTML or headers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Methodology

We read each source below on October 7, 2026 and quoted it directly. We did not test these controls on a live site or measure their effect on traffic; the time estimates come from Google's stated recrawl range. Bing's help page renders with JavaScript and was read in a browser. Google and Bing change these documents, so check the dates on each page.

1. official Google Search Central, Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications, last updated March 24, 2026. Read October 7, 2026.
2. official Google Search Central, AI features and your website, last updated December 10, 2025. Read October 7, 2026.
3. official Google Search Central, Google's common crawlers (Google-Extended), last updated July 14, 2026. Read October 7, 2026.
4. official Google Search Central, Control your snippets in search results, last updated April 20, 2026, and Featured snippets and your website. Read October 7, 2026.
5. official Search Console Help, URL Inspection tool, Search generative AI control and Generative AI performance report (Search). Read October 7, 2026.
6. official Google blog, New opportunities, control and insights for website owners, June 3, 2026. Read October 7, 2026.
7. official Bing Webmaster Tools Help, Robots meta tags and attributes that Bing supports. Read October 7, 2026.
8. official Bing Webmaster Blog, Announcing new options for webmasters to control usage of their content in Bing Chat, September 22, 2023. Read October 7, 2026.