Nosnippet is an instruction telling a search engine to list a page without its snippet, the lines of descriptive text that normally sit beneath a result's title. Site owners write it into a robots meta tag or send it in an HTTP response header. The page stays indexed and can still rank; it simply appears as a title and an address. The rule exists because some publishers want to be found without having their words reproduced on a results page they do not control. Google's documentation now extends it to AI Overviews and AI Mode, where it stops a page's content being used as a direct input, which has turned a display setting into one of the few levers publishers hold over generative search.

How the rule is read

The instruction takes the form of a meta element carrying name="robots" and content="nosnippet" in the head of a document. Replacing robots with a crawler's own token narrows the audience. Google recognises only two tokens in the tag, googlebot for all text results and googlebot-news for news, so a publisher can keep full snippets in web search while withholding them from Google News.

Files with no HTML head, such as PDFs, images or video, receive the same rule through the X-Robots-Tag response header, optionally prefixed with a user agent, as in "X-Robots-Tag: googlebot: nosnippet". Where rules conflict, the more restrictive one wins: a page carrying both max-snippet:50 and nosnippet is treated as nosnippet.

Two conditions apply. The page must be crawlable, because Google reads meta tags only on pages it fetches; a URL disallowed in robots.txt can still surface as a bare link while its nosnippet instruction goes unseen. The instruction should also sit in the HTML the crawler first receives: Google's December 2025 documentation update made clear that directives belong in the initial HTML rather than in JavaScript. Changes register only after a recrawl, which Google says can take from several days to several months.

At Google the effect covers web search, Google Images, Discover, AI Overviews and AI Mode, although a static thumbnail may survive where Google judges it useful. Structured data is largely exempt, apart from article descriptions and those of other creative works, so a recipe marked up in schema.org stays eligible for the recipe carousel.

Google's guide to AI features also makes eligibility for a snippet a condition for appearing as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page under nosnippet keeps its blue link and loses its place in those link sets. Publishers, their content management systems and search engine optimisation (SEO) teams set the rule; search engines and AI answer systems decide how to honour it.

From cached copies to AI inputs

The robots meta tag is older than Google. It emerged from the Distributed Indexing/Searching Workshop sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium in May 1996, with a vocabulary covering only indexing and link-following: index, noindex, follow, nofollow, all and none. Search engines added snippet control later. When Google explained how it read the tag on March 6, 2007, nosnippet was already listed, with a side effect since abandoned: it also stopped Google offering a cached copy of the page.

For twelve years the choice stayed binary. On September 24, 2019, Google introduced max-snippet, max-image-preview, max-video-preview and the data-nosnippet attribute, acknowledging that previously it had only been possible to allow a text snippet or refuse one. The announcement also named nosnippet as the only guaranteed exit from featured snippets, which need a minimum length of text that varies by language.

The timing was not incidental. France's neighbouring right for press publishers, transposing EU Directive 2019/790, took effect on October 24, 2019, and Google said it would stop showing snippets and thumbnails of European press publications in France unless publishers used the new tags to permit them. France's competition authority ordered interim measures on April 9, 2020 and fined Google EUR 500 million in July 2021 for breaching them.

Generative search changed what the rule was for. Google launched Google-Extended, a robots.txt token for AI training, on September 28, 2023, then said it did not govern the Search Generative Experience (SGE); in October its documentation added that SGE overviews would not show content blocked with nosnippet. On March 5, 2025, Google named AI Overviews and AI Mode in the robots meta tag documentation and stated that nosnippet keeps content from being used as a direct input for both. Guidance issued when AI Mode opened to all US users on May 20, 2025 listed nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex as the display controls.

Other operators followed. Bing said in 2023 that NOSNIPPET and MAXSNIPPET shaped its Generative AI Captions, and Microsoft adopted data-nosnippet for Bing and Copilot on October 15, 2025.

Why the snippet carries commercial weight

For an advertising-funded publisher, the snippet is the pitch that earns a click, and the click is the visit that carries ad impressions. The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) concluded in proposals published on January 28, 2026 that nosnippet was likely to cost publishers traffic, because they lose the text that helps searchers decide whether to click. It cited an internal Google study, run before AI products existed, in which reducing the detail shown for publisher content cut traffic by 45%, according to Press Gazette. Lawyers at Hausfeld put the loss higher in the French case, writing that a result without a preview had half the chance of a click.

Few sites pay that price. The HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac found nosnippet on 0.1% of desktop and mobile sites, against 2.2% of desktop sites for max-snippet and 5.0% for max-image-preview.

The cost sits at the root of the dispute. A publisher wanting out of AI Overviews could apply nosnippet, but only by surrendering its conventional snippet too. Independent publishers complained to the European Commission on June 30, 2025 that they could not opt out without losing search visibility. Penske Media's 101-page antitrust complaint of September 12, 2025 described the arrangement as coercion, and on October 10, 2025 Google's Robby Stein was pressed on the missing middle option during a podcast. Research compiled by PPC Land adds a cost on the other side: limiting preview text can lower a page's chance of being cited by AI search engines.

Where the rule falls short

Google's documentation ties nosnippet to display and to what feeds an AI answer as it is written; it says nothing about collection or training. PPC Land's analysis of AI Mode observed that the rule operates at the point of serving, not when content enters Google's stores. Training has separate controls, with narrow reach. Asked in court on May 2, 2025 whether Google's search organisation could train on data that publishers had opted out of through Google-Extended, Eli Collins, a Google DeepMind vice-president, replied: "Correct - for use in search," according to Bloomberg.

The rule is also blunt. It works on a whole page or, through data-nosnippet, on marked passages, and it cannot separate a classic listing from an AI answer. Sulina Connal, Google's managing director for news and books partnerships in Europe, called that separation a "huge engineering project" on February 11, 2026.

Operators read the same words differently. Bing's webmaster guidelines, as of September 2026, say nosnippet and data-nosnippet stop captions and may limit Copilot citation quality, but it is noarchive that keeps content out of Copilot responses and grounding, a rule Google says it no longer uses. PPC Land's account of Microsoft's crawler put it plainly: the attribute trims what is shown, not what is collected. Apple applies nosnippet to AI context at page level only.

Some surfaces sit outside the rule entirely. When Google let AI Mode draw on an open publisher page inside Chrome in April 2026, none of the existing controls, nosnippet included, addressed the embedding. Implementation is fragile as well: Google accepts data-nosnippet only on span, div and section elements, and an unclosed div suppresses everything after it.

Not the same as

Noindex removes a page from results altogether. Nosnippet keeps it listed, minus the description.

Max-snippet and data-nosnippet are refinements. The first caps a snippet's length in characters, with max-snippet:0 equivalent to nosnippet; the second excludes marked passages instead of the whole page.

Google-Extended is a robots.txt token governing Gemini training and grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. It has no effect on AI Overviews.

The Search generative AI control in Google Search Console removes an entire property from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative features in Discover while leaving ordinary snippets in place, the separation nosnippet cannot make.

Recent developments

On January 28, 2026, Ron Eden, a Google product management principal, wrote that the company was "exploring updates to our controls to let sites specifically opt out of Search generative AI features". The CMA imposed its Publisher Conduct Requirement on June 3, 2026, with obligations in force from December 3, 2026, and Google began testing a Search Console opt-out the same day. Documentation published in July 2026 describes a domain-level switch that takes effect in one to two days and does not stop model training. By August 31, 2026 the control had reached every site worldwide. Page-level controls are not due until March 3, 2027.

Apple moved separately, extending nosnippet on June 8, 2026 to bar tagged pages from serving as additional context for its models' output, while leaving them discoverable in Spotlight, Siri and Safari.

Until Google's page-level controls arrive, nosnippet and data-nosnippet remain, as of September 2026, the only page-level instruments Google documents for its AI features, and both still cost the ordinary snippet.

Timeline

  • May 1996: The robots meta tag emerges from the Distributed Indexing/Searching Workshop sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium
  • March 6, 2007: Google publishes guidance listing nosnippet, which then also suppressed cached copies
  • 2007: Google introduces the X-Robots-Tag header, extending robots rules to non-HTML files
  • September 24, 2019: Google announces max-snippet, max-image-preview, max-video-preview and data-nosnippet
  • September 25, 2019: Google says it will stop showing European press snippets in France unless publishers opt in
  • October 24, 2019: France's neighbouring right for press publishers takes effect
  • April 9, 2020: France's competition authority orders interim measures against Google
  • July 2021: The French authority fines Google EUR 500 million for breaching those measures
  • September 28, 2023: Google introduces the Google-Extended robots.txt token
  • October 2023: Google's documentation states that SGE overviews will not show content blocked with nosnippet
  • May 2024: AI Overviews launch in the United States
  • March 5, 2025: Google's robots meta tag documentation names AI Overviews and AI Mode
  • May 2, 2025: Eli Collins testifies that the search organisation can train on data opted out through Google-Extended
  • May 20, 2025: AI Mode becomes available to all US users
  • June 30, 2025: Independent publishers file an antitrust complaint with the European Commission over AI Overviews
  • September 12, 2025: Penske Media sues Google over its use of publisher content in AI products
  • October 10, 2025: Robby Stein is questioned on publisher controls for AI search
  • October 15, 2025: Bing adds support for data-nosnippet in Search and Copilot
  • December 18, 2025: Google updates its JavaScript SEO documentation
  • January 28, 2026: The CMA proposes conduct requirements; Google says it is exploring an AI-specific opt-out
  • February 11, 2026: Sulina Connal describes a separate AI opt-out as a huge engineering project
  • June 3, 2026: The CMA imposes the Publisher Conduct Requirement; Google begins testing a Search Console opt-out
  • June 8, 2026: Apple applies nosnippet to AI-generated output
  • July 20, 2026: Google publishes Search Console documentation for the Search generative AI control
  • August 31, 2026: The control reaches every site worldwide
  • December 3, 2026: The CMA's publisher obligations take effect
  • March 3, 2027: Page-level controls are due under the CMA requirement

Summary

Who: Publishers, site owners and SEO teams apply the rule; Google, Microsoft's Bing and Apple's Applebot honour it, each in its own way. Regulators, chiefly the UK Competition and Markets Authority and France's competition authority, have shaped how Google treats snippets and the controls around them.

What: A robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag value that suppresses the text snippet and video preview for a page while leaving it indexed. At Google it also bars the page from serving as a direct input to AI Overviews and AI Mode and, in practice, from their supporting links. Siblings include max-snippet, which caps length, and data-nosnippet, which excludes marked passages.

When: The robots meta tag dates from 1996, and nosnippet appeared in Google's guidance by March 2007. Finer snippet controls followed in September 2019; Google tied nosnippet to generative answers from October 2023 and named AI Overviews and AI Mode in March 2025. A domain-level AI opt-out reached all sites on August 31, 2026, with page-level controls due on March 3, 2027.

Where: In a page's HTML head or its HTTP response headers, read by crawlers when a page is fetched, with effects across web search, image search, Discover and AI answer surfaces.

Why: The snippet helps earn the click that ad-funded publishing depends on, and removing it has been estimated to cut traffic by 45% to 50%. That price made nosnippet a costly route out of AI Overviews, and the absence of a cheaper one drove complaints, litigation and regulation that are only now producing separate controls.