What is Nosnippet?

Three levels of control

Google gives you three ways to limit how a page is summarised in results:

<!-- 1) Whole page: no snippet at all -->
<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">

<!-- 2) Length cap: at most 80 characters -->
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:80">

<!-- 3) One passage only -->
<p>The product description may appear in snippets.
  <span data-nosnippet>Reseller discount terms will not.</span>
</p>

The first two are meta robots directives and can also be sent as an X-Robots-Tag header for non-HTML files. data-nosnippet is an HTML attribute, which Google supports on span, div and section elements. It is a boolean attribute, so any value you give it is ignored. To avoid rendering ambiguity, Google asks that you don't add or remove it on existing elements with JavaScript.

How it affects AI features

Google's robots meta tag documentation says nosnippet applies to all forms of search results, including web search, Google Images, Discover, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that it also prevents the content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode. max-snippet limits how much content can be used in that way. Google also states that to appear as a supporting link in these features, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet, so a page-wide nosnippet effectively removes the page as a cited source in those AI answers.

Don't confuse this with Google-Extended, a robots.txt token for limiting the use of content for training and grounding in some of Google's other systems. Snippets and AI summaries in Google Search are governed by nosnippet. Bing announced support for data-nosnippet in October 2025, covering both its search snippets and AI summaries in Copilot.

The cost

A result without a snippet shows only a title and URL. Searchers can't preview what the page says, so click-through rates usually suffer. nosnippet also removes the page from featured snippets entirely; if you only want to avoid featured snippets, Google suggests keeping regular snippets and experimenting with lower max-snippet values, although that is not guaranteed to work. A page-wide nosnippet also makes your meta description pointless, since it won't be displayed.

When it makes sense

• At passage level: keeping cookie notices, shipping warnings or constantly changing price and stock lines out of snippets with data-nosnippet, because they produce misleading summaries.
• Sensitive but public details: you want the page to be found, just not a particular part of it quoted in results.
• At page level: rarely, for instance when not being summarised in any form is a deliberate publishing policy.

Nosnippet is not a privacy or security control. The content is still crawled, indexed and readable by anyone who visits the page. Information that must stay private needs access control. Google keeps the current definitions in its guide to AI features and your website.