AI snippet is an informal SEO label for the text that Google shows from a page inside its AI answers, or for the AI-written summary itself. Google’s own documentation uses the names AI Overviews and AI Mode instead.
What does “AI snippet” mean in SEO?
The term has no fixed definition. Some authors mean the short excerpt of a page that appears next to a link in an AI answer. Others mean the whole generated summary above the results. Many search results for the phrase are unrelated, because it also names text-expander and prompt-library tools.
Google describes the links in AI Overviews and AI Mode as a wider and more diverse set than in classic results, and says the features use “query fan-out”, which means issuing several related searches across subtopics. Google also states that there are no additional requirements to appear in these features and no special optimizations necessary.
How can you control the text shown?
The controls are the same as for classic snippets. nosnippet and data-nosnippet limit what is shown from your pages, max-snippet limits the length, and noindex keeps a page out of the index and therefore out of AI features. Google sources snippets mainly from the page content and only sometimes from the meta description.
Example
Limit the preview text to 80 characters and hide one block from snippets:
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:80">
<p>Public intro text.</p>
<p data-nosnippet>Internal note that should not appear in previews.</p>
Sources
- AI features and your website - Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Snippets - Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag - Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
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