Configure snippet and preview control directives to manage how content is quoted in search results
domain: robots-directives · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Distinguish directive layers: robots.txt controls crawling access, while meta robots/X-Robots-Tag and data-nosnippet control what's shown from an already-indexed page
Add nosnippet to a meta robots tag or X-Robots-Tag header to suppress all text/video snippets for a page
Use max-snippet:[number], max-image-preview:[standard|large|none], and max-video-preview:[number] to cap preview sizes without fully suppressing them
Wrap specific on-page HTML elements in a data-nosnippet attribute to exclude just that fragment (e.g., a price or disclaimer) from snippets while allowing the rest of the page to be quoted
Test with URL Inspection or a live fetch and confirm the served snippet respects the directive combination
Known gotchas
When directives conflict, the most restrictive one wins — combining nosnippet with max-snippet is redundant since nosnippet fully overrides it
These directives only affect how an already-crawlable, indexable page is displayed; they don't stop crawling (that's robots.txt) or stop indexing (that's noindex)
data-nosnippet only suppresses that fragment from snippets — it doesn't remove the content from the index or necessarily from AI summarization of the full rendered page
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