max-snippet: definition and how it works

max-snippet is a page-level instruction that caps snippet length. It tells a search engine how many characters of your text it may display when it shows your page.

It lives alongside other robots directives such as noindex and nosnippet. Google's robots meta tag specification documents it, and Google and Bing both treat these directives as the on-page controls for how content appears in search and AI answers.

The value is a number:

• A positive number (for example 50) caps the snippet at that many characters.
• 0 means no text snippet may be shown.
• -1 means no limit: the engine decides the length.

You set max-snippet in one of two places. In the HTML head:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:50">

Or as an HTTP response header, which also works for non-HTML files such as PDFs:

X-Robots-Tag: max-snippet:0

You can combine it with other directives in one tag, separated by commas, for example content="max-snippet:160, max-image-preview:large". You can also target one crawler by replacing robots with that crawler's name, such as googlebot.

The crawler has to fetch the page to read the directive. If robots.txt blocks the crawler, it never sees the tag. That is why max-snippet is not a robots.txt rule: robots.txt controls fetching, while max-snippet controls display of a page the engine has already fetched.

Google states that to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet." It adds that there are no additional technical requirements. So snippet eligibility is one of the few hard gates into Google's AI features, as of October 2026.

That makes max-snippet:0 a switch. Set it, and the page stays indexed but can't serve as a supporting link in those features. There is no robots.txt token for AI Overviews or AI Mode, so snippet directives and noindex are the page-level controls site owners actually hold.

What this means in practice:

• If you want a page out of AI answers while keeping it in search, max-snippet:0 or nosnippet does that. For a single block of text rather than a whole page, use data-nosnippet.
• If you want a page considered, check that it carries no max-snippet:0. This is part of index eligibility, and removing an accidental block is a fix you control.
• What you don't control: whether an eligible page gets retrieved or cited for a given question. Eligibility is not inclusion. Google says indexing and serving aren't guaranteed.

For a site-wide sweep of these tags, follow the snippet controls audit.

"A longer max-snippet gets you cited more"

No evidence supports this. Snippet controls are subtractive: they can make a page ineligible, and removing them restores eligibility. No markup or setting has been shown to make a page more likely to be chosen.

"max-snippet is the meta description length"

It isn't. The meta description is text you suggest. max-snippet limits how much text the engine may show, whatever the source.

"max-snippet:0 removes the page from Google"

It doesn't. The page can stay indexed and rank. Only snippet display, and with it AI feature eligibility, goes away. To remove a page from the index, use noindex. The trade-offs are laid out in noindex vs nosnippet vs data-nosnippet.

"It stops AI training"

It doesn't. Training use is governed by separate crawler tokens, such as Google-Extended for Gemini and GPTBot for OpenAI. Each setting is independent.

• nosnippet: blocks all text snippets for a page. It behaves much like max-snippet:0.
• data-nosnippet: an HTML attribute that hides one section from snippets. Bing added support in October 2025 and says such content is excluded from snippets and AI summaries.
• Index eligibility: the set of conditions a page must meet before any engine can show it.
• Featured snippet: the boxed answer in classic results, which also depends on snippet eligibility.

For how these controls interact in AI answers across engines, read the nosnippet and data-nosnippet guide.