When Google announced it is rolling out AI Overviews in the US search results and last year when Google launched SGE in labs, SEOs and content creators wanted to know how to prevent their content from showing up in these responses. Well, you can, but only through Google Search controls as I covered in my larger story.
Glenn Gabe tested the nosnippet control out and it worked – he wrote up a detailed case study here. He was able to remove his content and link card from the AI Overview by adding a nosnippet to the content that Google was using for the AI Overview. But when it was removed, that snippet in the Google Search results had its description removed from the normal search listings.
Here is what the AI Overview looked like prior to the nosnippet being added:
Here is what the AI changed to after the nosnippet was crawled and processed by Google Search (it took a few hours, Glenn said):
But the normal snippet in search for his site now no longer shows a description section, it is just the title and date:
Of course, you can all experiment with variations of nosnippets, like using max-snippet data-nosnippet. But that would mean you need to do trial and error on each and every URL that is used for the AI Overviews, which can be time consuming.
