What is nosnippet?

Three ways to apply it

For a whole page, in the HTML head:

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

For non-HTML files such as PDFs, as a response header:

X-Robots-Tag: nosnippet

For one passage only, with the data-nosnippet attribute, which Google supports on span, div and section elements:

<p>Our standard plan includes email support.
<span data-nosnippet>Internal reference: tier B, code 4471.</span></p>

The rest of the page remains available for snippets. The marked passage is still crawled and indexed. It just cannot be quoted.

What changes in the results

• No text snippet, whether Google would have used your meta description or text from the page.
• No video preview.
• No featured snippet, because a featured snippet is a snippet.
• Not used as direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• An image thumbnail may still appear. Image previews are governed by max-image-preview.

The rule is equivalent to max-snippet:0. If you want a shorter snippet instead of none, set max-snippet to a character count.

The cost of using it

A result with no description gives searchers less to go on than the results around it, so it usually earns fewer clicks. The page is also out of the running for every feature that quotes content. That is a real price, so apply the rule for a specific reason:

• content behind a paywall or licence that must not be excerpted;
• legal or compliance text where a partial quote could mislead;
• pages whose snippets keep exposing details you would prefer people read in context.

For a single sensitive line, data-nosnippet is nearly always the better tool, since it leaves the page's listing intact.

Two limits to keep in mind. The rule only works if crawlers can fetch the page, so a URL blocked in robots.txt never has its nosnippet read. And it is a Google and Bing display control, not a privacy mechanism: the text is still public and still indexed.

Setting it in WordPress

WordPress core has no snippet setting. Hydrogen SEO, from version 0.0.30, has a No snippet switch both site-wide and per post, and leaves max-snippet and max-video-preview out of the tag when it is on, since nosnippet already rules both out; see advanced robots meta. The data-nosnippet attribute is added in the content itself, on an HTML element in a Custom HTML block or in a theme template.

Afterwards, view the page source to confirm the tag, and use the URL Inspection tool to check Google can fetch the page.