Google details how to control content in AI search

Google’s documentation on AI features now spells out exactly how a site controls whether its pages appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, and the answer comes with a catch. The same controls that pull your content out of AI answers, nosnippet and its siblings, also strip your snippet from ordinary search results. For brands weighing whether to opt out of AI features, that trade-off is the whole story.

What happened

Google’s “AI Features and Your Website” guidance lists the controls site owners have. To limit what is shown from a page, you can use nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, or noindex. To limit AI training and grounding in some of Google’s other systems, there is the Google-Extended robots token. The important clarification is what Google-Extended does not do: AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on the regular search index through Googlebot, so blocking Google-Extended does not remove a page from those features.

According to Google Search Central, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet before it can show up in AI features at all. There is no separate AI index and no separate submission step.

Why it matters

The catch sits inside the snippet controls. Because nosnippet, data-nosnippet, and max-snippet govern the preview text Google can show, using them to keep content out of AI answers also removes the snippet from standard results. Opting out of AI features through these directives therefore means going partly dark in classic search too. Google’s 3 June 2026 Search Console generative AI performance reports let brands at least measure that AI exposure, even if controlling it still means accepting the snippet trade-off.

“There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.”

Google Search Central, AI Features and Your Website

The wider point matches Google’s standing position that optimizing for AI search is still just SEO: the crawlability, indexing, and content quality that win in Search are the same factors that win in AI features.

What this means for multi-location brands

At scale this is a governance decision, not a page-by-page toggle. A central team running thousands of location pages, store-locator pages, and landing pages has to set robots directives and meta tags once and enforce them everywhere, because a control applied inconsistently across markets produces inconsistent AI visibility. Decide deliberately which templates should stay fully eligible and audit that the rule actually holds across the estate.

The practical move is to treat AI eligibility as part of listing and content hygiene rather than a separate project. Keep location and content pages indexable and snippet-eligible through a consistent local business listing foundation, measure where AI surfaces them with location-level insights, and fold the controls into the same generative engine optimization workflow you already run market by market.

The bottom line

Google has made the controls explicit, and the headline is the trade-off: opting out of AI answers through snippet controls still costs you in classic search, and Google-Extended will not do the job. For a large brand, the task is to govern these settings consistently across every template, so AI visibility is a choice you made on purpose rather than an accident of inconsistent tags.