What is the nosnippet directive?

We see nosnippet quietly applied on pages where someone, at some point, wanted to hide pricing or stop a snippet from "giving away" something. The original goal usually had nothing to do with AI. The page predated AI Overviews by years. Then AI Overviews launched, the page silently dropped out of eligibility, and nobody connected the two events.

The directive looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">

Or it ships as a header on the response:

X-Robots-Tag: nosnippet

Or it appears as max-snippet:0, which is the same thing in different syntax:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:0">

All three forms make the page ineligible to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. They also make the page useless for classic snippet display in regular results.

The most common place we find it: legacy meta robots tags from 2018-2020 SEO advice that recommended nosnippet for "duplicate content protection" or "competitor scraping." Both rationales are weak now. AI Overviews changed the cost.

When we ran our own AI Overview Checker on customer sites, nosnippet on a critical page was the single failure that surprised people most. It is also the easiest one to fix.

Remove the directive on any page you want to appear in AI features.

If you have a legitimate reason to hide one section (a price, an internal note, a paywalled excerpt) but want the rest of the page to remain snippet- and AI-eligible, use the data-nosnippet attribute on that section only. The page stays eligible. Only the marked region is excluded.

Step 1: Search your codebase

Look for any of these patterns and confirm they are intentional:

nosnippet
max-snippet:0
max-snippet:"0"

Check meta tags, response headers (X-Robots-Tag), and CDN/WAF rule sets. We have seen all three in real customer projects.

Step 2: For pages that should appear in AI Overviews, remove the directive

Replace this:

<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">

With nothing, or with the recommended max-eligibility directive:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1">

-1 means "no limit." This is the maximum-visibility setting. (See the max-snippet glossary entry.)

Step 3: If you have a section to hide, use data-nosnippet instead

<article>
  <h1>Our enterprise plan pricing</h1>
  <p>Custom pricing based on usage. <span data-nosnippet>(Internal note: legacy customers grandfathered at the 2022 rate of $99/month, do not surface.)</span> Contact us for a quote.</p>
</article>

The internal note will not appear in any Google snippet. The rest of the page remains fully snippet- and AI Overview-eligible.

Step 4: Verify

Re-fetch the page (or run it through the AI Overview Checker). The "Eligible to show with a snippet" check should now pass.

• Applying nosnippet site-wide via a template that wraps the head element. One layout change, every page broken. We always recommend per-page directives over template-level defaults for snippet controls.
• Setting X-Robots-Tag: nosnippet at the CDN. Easy to miss because it is not in the HTML. Search Console's URL Inspection tool will surface it; raw HTML view will not.
• Using data-nosnippet on a <div> that wraps the entire article. Same effect as page-level nosnippet. The attribute is meant for small excerpts.
• Confusing nosnippet with noarchive. noarchive blocks the cached page link. nosnippet blocks the text preview. Only nosnippet blocks AI Overviews.