nosnippet

What the rule says

The definition is one paragraph in Google's robots documentation, and three separate things are packed into it:

"Do not show a text snippet or video preview in the search results for this page. A static image thumbnail (if available) may still be visible, when it results in a better user experience. This 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."

It names the AI surfaces. AI Overviews and AI Mode appear twice in that paragraph, once in the list of result types and once in a clause about use rather than display. For a single page, it is the rule Google documents for keeping content out of an AI answer. For a whole site, Search Console has had a separate setting, announced on 3 June 2026 and available to all websites since 31 August 2026.

It applies to web search in the same breath. Within this rule, the AI effect cannot be set on its own. The rule reaches every result type at once, ordinary blue links included.

An image can survive it. The static thumbnail is explicitly exempted, at Google's discretion, which surprises people who set the rule expecting a blank result.

It only works if the crawler is allowed to read it

The documentation states the condition in its opening section:

"Keep in mind that these settings can be read and followed only if crawlers are allowed to access the pages that include these settings."

This is the failure that looks like success. Blocking a page in robots.txt feels stricter than nosnippet, so people do both, or do the first instead of the second. A blocked page never delivers its rule. Google can still list the URL from other signals, and the instruction you wrote is sitting in a file nobody fetched.

If you want nosnippet honoured, the page has to stay crawlable.

Where it goes

nosnippet works as a meta tag or as an HTTP response header. Google says any rule available in a robots meta tag can also be given as an X-Robots-Tag, which is the route for files that have no HTML head at all, such as PDFs.

Placement inside the document is more forgiving than most people assume:

"Google Search doesn't enforce placement of meta robots in the HTML head and will respect robots meta tags in the body section of an HTML document as well."

You can also address one crawler rather than all of them. Google supports two user agent tokens in the robots meta tag, googlebot for text results and googlebot-news for news results, and its own example suppresses the snippet in Google News while leaving the ordinary one intact:

<meta name="googlebot-news" content="nosnippet">

Structured data goes around it

The same page carries an exception that undoes part of the effect, and it is easy to miss because it sits under a different heading. Robots meta tag limitations do not affect the use of schema.org structured data, apart from description values. Google puts it plainly for the section-level attribute, and the same logic governs the page-level rule:

"structured data remains usable for search results when declared within a data-nosnippet element"

A page can therefore carry nosnippet, show no text snippet, and still feed a rich result from its JSON-LD. If the content you wanted to withhold is also in your structured data, you have withheld nothing. The fix is to change the structured data, not to add another robots rule.

When rules disagree

"In the case of conflicting robots rules, the more restrictive rule applies. For example, if a page has both max-snippet:50 and nosnippet rules, the nosnippet rule will apply."

Worth knowing in the other direction too: max-snippet:0 is documented as "Equivalent to nosnippet", so a template that sets a zero length is setting the full rule without saying so.

What to do with it

Price it before you set it. The snippet you lose is the one earning your clicks today. Weigh that against what you gain by keeping the page out of AI answers, and be honest that the first number is measurable and the second is not.

For a whole site, look at Search Console first. The Search generative AI control excludes a site from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google says it "isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search".

Never pair it with a robots.txt disallow. The disallow prevents the rule from being read. Pick one.

Check your structured data at the same time. Otherwise the content leaves by the other door.

Use the crawler tokens if the problem is one surface. Suppressing a News snippet does not cost you the web snippet.

Do not expect a blank result. Title, URL and possibly a thumbnail remain.