max-snippet & previews

TL;DR — These three robots directives tell Google how much of your page it can show in a search result — not whether to show it at all. max-snippet caps the text snippet, max-image-preview caps the image size, and max-video-preview caps the video preview length. They control display, not indexing. The one to be careful with is max-snippet:0: it removes your text snippet entirely (same as nosnippet) and can quietly cost you featured snippets and clicks.

Evidence for this claim Google supports max-snippet to set a text-snippet character limit and max-image-preview to set the maximum preview-image size. Scope: Google Search result presentation controls, not indexing or ranking controls. Confidence: high · Verified: 2026-07-14 Google Search Central: Robots directives Evidence for this claim Google documents that stricter snippet controls also limit eligible direct inputs and previews in certain AI search features. Scope: Current Google Search AI-feature controls; feature presentation can change. Confidence: high · Verified: 2026-07-14 Google Search Central: AI features and your website

What these directives do

When your page shows up in Google, the result usually has a short text snippet, and often an image or a video preview. These three settings let you put a ceiling on each of those:

• max-snippet — how many characters of text Google can show.
• max-image-preview — how big an image Google can show (none, standard, or large).
• max-video-preview — how many seconds of a video Google can play in the preview.

You add them to the same robots meta tag you’d use for things like noindex, or you send them in the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. If you don’t set them, Google just picks whatever it thinks works best.

The most important thing to understand

These don’t keep your page out of Google. They don’t change whether you’re indexed or where you rank — they only change how much Google displays. If you want a page gone from search, that’s noindex, not these.

The common confusion is thinking max-snippet controls your meta description. It doesn’t. It caps the snippet Google shows in the results, which Google often writes from your page content regardless of what your <meta name="description"> says.

The one setting to be careful with

max-snippet:0 means “show no text snippet.” That sounds harmless, but it’s the same as the nosnippet directive — and a result with no description looks awkward and tends to get fewer clicks. Worse, a page with no snippet usually can’t appear as a featured snippet, and it limits how much of your content Google can pull into AI Overviews. So there’s a real tradeoff: cutting your snippet to protect content also cuts your visibility.

A quick recipe

Most sites that touch these at all just want the opposite — let Google show plenty. The common “let everything through” tag is:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1">

That allows a full-length snippet, a large image (which also helps with Google Discover), and an unrestricted video preview.

Want the exact value semantics, the X-Robots-Tag setup, how these interact with AI Overviews, and where they came from? Switch to the Advanced tab.

TL;DR — max-snippet, max-image-preview, and max-video-preview are robots directives that cap display, not indexing. max-snippet:[number] limits the text snippet (0 = none, equal to nosnippet; -1 = Google chooses) and also limits how much content feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode. max-image-preview takes none / standard / large (large enables big Discover/preview images, pair with images at least 1200px wide and over 300,000 total pixels). max-video-preview:[seconds] caps inline video (0 = static image at most; -1 = no limit). Set via robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag, combine in one comma-separated tag, most-restrictive rule wins, and the page must stay crawlable. The honest catch: at the page level, max-snippet:0/nosnippet strips featured snippets and AI-Overview/AI-Mode input together — a genuine CTR tradeoff. Google is separately testing a property-level Search generative AI control for excluding AI Overviews/AI Mode/Discover AI without touching your snippet, but it’s in limited rollout and distinct from these directives.

Evidence for this claim Google supports max-snippet to set a text-snippet character limit and max-image-preview to set the maximum preview-image size. Scope: Google Search result presentation controls, not indexing or ranking controls. Confidence: high · Verified: 2026-07-14 Google Search Central: Robots directives Evidence for this claim Google documents that stricter snippet controls also limit eligible direct inputs and previews in certain AI search features. Scope: Current Google Search AI-feature controls; feature presentation can change. Confidence: high · Verified: 2026-07-14 Google Search Central: AI features and your website

Display controls, not indexing controls

The mental model to lock in first: these directives govern how much Google may show or use from a page, not whether the page is indexed or how it ranks. That’s what separates them from noindex (removes the page) and even from the crawl-blocking robots.txt disallow. They live in the same family as the robots meta tag and the X-Robots-Tag header, and they’re the graduated version of the binary nosnippet / data-nosnippet — instead of “snippet on or off,” you set a ceiling. Google’s own wording is consistently “maximum” and “may”: these directives set a permission ceiling on what Google may display if it decides to show something at all. None of them guarantees indexing, ranking, that a preview of any size will actually appear, or any particular amount of traffic or click-through — they only cap the upper bound.

max-snippet — the text snippet

max-snippet:[number] caps the textual snippet to N characters. The two special values are the ones to memorize:

• max-snippet:0 — no text snippet. Google’s spec is explicit that this is equivalent to nosnippet.
• max-snippet:-1 — Google chooses the snippet length it believes is most effective.

It does not touch image or video previews — those have their own directives. The load-bearing modern detail is that max-snippet also governs AI features. Per Google’s spec, it applies across web search, Images, Discover, Assistant, AI Overviews, and AI Mode, and “will also limit how much of the content may be used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode.” There’s a carve-out: this limit doesn’t apply where a publisher has separately granted permission for the content (for instance, in-page structured data, AMP, or a license agreement with Google).

The practical consequence — and the thing worth being honest about — is that these page-level directives don’t give you a clean “opt out of AI Overviews only” lever. max-snippet and nosnippet cut your AI-Overview/AI-Mode input and your normal text snippet at the same time; you can’t keep one and drop the other with these tags alone.

That’s changing at a different layer, though: Google is rolling out a Search generative AI control in Search Console — a property-level setting, separate from these page directives, that lets you include, exclude, or inherit your site’s participation in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Discover, without touching your normal snippet. As of this writing it’s in a subset rollout (available to some site owners, not all yet), and an exclusion can take one to two days or longer to propagate. It’s also distinct from Google-Extended, which controls model training, not what appears in these Search AI features. So there are now three separate levers: the page-level preview directives covered on this page (bundle snippet + AI-input control), the property-level Search generative AI control (AI-only, no snippet impact, but still rolling out), and Google-Extended (training only).

max-image-preview — the image preview

max-image-preview:[setting] caps the image preview size, with three values:

• none — no image preview.
• standard — a default-size preview may be shown.
• large — a larger preview, up to the width of the viewport, may be shown.

If you don’t set it, Google may show a default-size preview. The reason most people reach for this is large: it’s the standard recommendation for Google Discover and other large-image treatments. Google’s current Discover image guidance is specific — a relevant, high-quality image at least 1200px wide, with more than 300,000 total pixels, in a 16:9 aspect ratio — and it’s enabled by max-image-preview:large or AMP. Frame it honestly though: eligibility, the large permission, which image gets selected, and whether Discover actually shows it are four separate things, and Google is explicit that being eligible to appear in Discover isn’t a guarantee of appearing. large isn’t a ranking factor.

max-video-preview — the video preview

max-video-preview:[number] caps the inline video preview to N seconds:

• 0 — at most a static image may be used (governed by your max-image-preview setting). Note this is “a still frame at most,” not “no video media whatsoever.”
• -1 — no limit.

Unset, Google decides the preview length.

One edge case worth knowing for both max-snippet and max-video-preview: if the number you supply isn’t parseable — a non-numeric or malformed value where Google expects an integer — Google ignores that directive entirely and falls back to its default behavior for it. The 0 and -1 special values always keep their documented meaning; it’s everything else that has to parse cleanly to take effect.

Combining them in one tag

All three live in one comma-separated directive. Google’s own canonical example limits the snippet to 20 characters and allows a large image:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:20, max-image-preview:large">

You can also split them across separate meta tags — same effect. Two rules govern how they resolve:

• Most-restrictive wins. If a page carries both max-snippet:50 and nosnippet, the nosnippet rule applies (no snippet at all). This is Google’s documented conflict-resolution rule specifically — Bing supports the same three directives (see below), but its combined-tag conflict handling and any AI-product effects aren’t documented the same way, so verify per engine rather than assuming identical behavior.
• The page must be crawlable. These are read during crawling, so they aren’t governed by a robots.txt disallow — but if you do block the page in robots.txt, Google never fetches it and never sees the tag. Don’t pair these with a disallow.

A couple of realistic recipes:

<!-- Publisher who wants maximum SERP + Discover surface -->
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1">

<!-- News site wary of feeding long passages into AI features -->
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:[low number], max-image-preview:large">

Robots meta tag vs X-Robots-Tag

Same directives, two delivery mechanisms:

• Robots meta tag — an HTML element in the page <head>. Best for individual pages.
• X-Robots-Tag — an HTTP response header set at the server (Apache, Nginx, or a CDN). This is how you apply max-image-preview / max-video-preview caps to non-HTML files like images, PDFs, and video that have no <head>, and how you apply a rule in bulk or site-wide.

The rules are case-insensitive, and you can verify a live header with curl -I against the public URL. Watch for a CDN serving a different header than your origin.

How to test

• URL Inspection (Search Console) — check the HTML Googlebot actually received, so you can confirm the tag is present and not stripped by a plugin or CDN.
• curl -I — confirm the X-Robots-Tag header is being sent for the header approach.
• Don’t robots.txt-block the page — if Google can’t crawl it, none of these caps are read.

The tradeoff, and a bit of history

These shipped on September 24, 2019 (effective mid-to-late October 2019). Google’s own announcement doesn’t say why — but the widely reported industry driver was the EU Copyright Directive: France’s 2019 implementation pushed Google to give publishers granular control over how much preview content appeared, in lieu of paying for snippets. (That EU-origin framing is industry-sourced, not from Google’s post — so treat it as context, not a Google statement.)

The honest bottom line: capping snippets is not free. As Glenn Gabe documented when he tested the preview controls, applying nosnippet removed his content from an AI Overview — but it also left his normal search listing with no description, which he expected would hurt click-through rate. Barry Schwartz flagged the featured-snippet angle back in 2019: drop below the minimum text a featured snippet needs and you can fall out of that position. So max-snippet:0 / nosnippet is a real CTR decision at the page level, not a tidy AI-only opt-out — that separate lever now exists as the property-level Search generative AI control described above, still in limited rollout. For the all-or-nothing on/off control and the surgical, per-section variant, see the nosnippet / data-nosnippet article; the robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag header pages cover the full directive set.

AI summary

A condensed take on the Advanced version:

• All three are display controls, not indexing controls. They cap how much Google may show or use from a page; they don’t change indexing or ranking (that’s noindex). They’re the graduated version of the on/off nosnippet.
• max-snippet:[number] caps the text snippet: 0 = none (equal to nosnippet), -1 = Google chooses, an unparseable value is ignored. It also limits how much content feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode — with a carve-out for separately permitted content (structured data / AMP / a Google license). No image/video effect.
• max-image-preview:[none|standard|large] caps image size. large enables big previews and Google Discover eligibility (pair with images at least 1200px wide, over 300,000 total pixels, 16:9) — an eligibility enabler, not a ranking signal, and eligibility itself isn’t a guarantee of appearing.
• max-video-preview:[seconds] caps inline video: 0 = a static image at most, -1 = no limit, an unparseable value is ignored.
• Delivery: robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header; combine all three in one comma-separated tag. Most-restrictive rule wins (Google’s documented behavior; don’t assume Bing resolves conflicts identically); the page must stay crawlable (don’t robots.txt-block it). Bing supports the same three directives, treated as directives not hints, per its 2020 announcement.
• The tradeoff: at the page level, max-snippet:0/nosnippet strips featured-snippet eligibility and AI-Overview/AI-Mode input and your normal description — a genuine CTR decision. Google is separately testing a property-level Search generative AI control (Search Console) to exclude AI Overviews/AI Mode/Discover AI without touching the snippet; it’s in limited rollout and distinct from Google-Extended (training only).

Official documentation

Primary-source documentation from the search engines.

Google

• Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications — the spec doc: the full max-snippet, max-image-preview, and max-video-preview rows, value semantics, the combined-tag example, and the most-restrictive-rule resolution.
• More options to help websites preview their content on Google Search (Sept 24, 2019) — the original announcement introducing all three directives.
• AI features and your website — confirms nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, and noindex are the controls for limiting what’s shown from your pages, including in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• Search generative AI control (Search Console Help) — a separate, property-level include/exclude/inherit setting for AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Discover; distinct from the page-level directives on this page and from Google-Extended. In a subset rollout as of this research; exclusions can take 1–2 days or longer to propagate.
• Google Discover — current image requirements (at least 1200px wide, over 300,000 total pixels, 16:9 ratio) and why max-image-preview:large or AMP matters for Discover eligibility — eligibility itself isn’t a guarantee of appearing.
• Block search indexing — where nosnippet and these preview controls sit alongside noindex.

Bing / Microsoft

• Announcing new options for webmasters to control their snippets at Bing (Fabrice Canel, April 8, 2020) — Bing supports all three directives with the same syntax, via meta robots or X-Robots-Tag, and treats them as directives rather than hints.

Quotes from the source

On-the-record statements from Google. Each link is a deep link that jumps to the quoted passage on the source page.

Google — the spec doc (the load-bearing source)

• “max-snippet: [number] Use a maximum of [number] characters as a textual snippet for this search result… This does not affect image or video previews. This applies to all forms of search results (such as Google web search, Google Images, Discover, Assistant, AI Overviews, AI Mode) and will also limit how much of the content may be used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode. However, this limit does not apply in cases where a publisher has separately granted permission for use of content.” — Google Search Central docs. Jump to quote
• “0 : No snippet is to be shown. Equivalent to nosnippet . -1 : Google will choose the snippet length that it believes is most effective to help users discover your content and direct users to your site.” Jump to quote
• “max-image-preview: [setting] Set the maximum size of an image preview for this page in search results… none : No image preview is to be shown. standard : A default image preview may be shown. large : A larger image preview, up to the width of the viewport, may be shown.” Jump to quote
• “max-video-preview: [number] Use a maximum of [number] seconds as a video snippet for videos on this page in search results… Special values: 0 : At most, a static image may be used, in accordance to the max-image-preview setting. -1 : There is no limit.” Jump to quote
• “In the case of conflicting robots rules, the more restrictive rule applies. For example, if a page has both max-snippet:50 and nosnippet rules, the nosnippet rule will apply.” Jump to quote
• “Here is an example that limits the text snippet to 20 characters, and allows a large image preview:” <meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:20, max-image-preview:large"> Jump to quote

Google — the 2019 announcement

• “Google uses content previews, including text snippets and other media, to help people decide whether a result is relevant to their query.” — Google Search Central Blog, Sept 24, 2019. Jump to quote
• “Preview settings from these meta tags will become effective in mid-to-late October 2019 and may take about a week for the global rollout to complete.” Jump to quote

Google — AI features

• “To limit the information shown from your pages in Search, use nosnippet , data-nosnippet , max-snippet , or noindex controls.” — Google Search Central docs. Jump to quote

Snippet preview controls — cheat sheet

The three directives at a glance

Combine in one tag

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:20, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1">

Fast facts

• They control display, not indexing. Use noindex to remove a page. None of these guarantee indexing, ranking, that a preview appears at all, or traffic.
• max-snippet:0 = nosnippet. At the page level there’s still no AI-only opt-out — but Google is testing a separate property-level Search generative AI control (Search Console, limited rollout) that excludes AI Overviews/AI Mode/Discover AI without touching your snippet.
• max-snippet does not affect image or video previews — those are separate.
• max-image-preview:large → pair with images ≥1200px wide, >300,000 total pixels, 16:9 for Discover eligibility (not a ranking factor, and eligibility isn’t a guarantee of appearing).
• Set via robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header (use the header for images, PDFs, video, and bulk).
• Most-restrictive rule wins (Google’s documented behavior); the page must stay crawlable (don’t robots.txt-block it).
• Bing supports all three with the same syntax, as directives — but its conflict handling and AI-product behavior aren’t documented the same way as Google’s, so verify per engine.

Tools for testing snippet controls

• HTTP Header Checker — the delivery mechanism this article documents as the header-based alternative to the robots meta tag. Point it at a URL and it inspects the complete response headers across every redirect hop, so you can confirm whether X-Robots-Tag: max-snippet:20, max-image-preview:large (or whatever combination you’ve set) is actually being sent — and catch the case above where a CDN serves a different header than your origin. Useful for the non-HTML case too: images, PDFs, and video have no <head> for a meta tag, so the header is the only way to apply these caps to them, and you need a way to confirm it landed.
• curl -I — the manual equivalent from the “How to test” section: a quick command-line check that the X-Robots-Tag header is present on a given response, case-insensitive rules and all.
• URL Inspection (Search Console) — shows the HTML Googlebot actually received, so you can confirm a robots-meta-tag version of the directive is present and wasn’t stripped by a plugin or CDN before it reached Google.

Which snippet-control recipe should I use?

The article lays out two contrasting goal-based recipes. Answer one question about what you’re optimizing for and land on the right tag.

The mental models

1. Default behavior when unset. Set none of these and Google decides for itself — it picks the snippet length, the image-preview size, and the video-preview duration. So you only need them when you want a ceiling different from Google’s default, or when you want to explicitly open the taps (e.g. max-image-preview:large for Discover).

2. One tag, three dials. Treat them as a single comma-separated directive with three independent knobs: text length, image size, video seconds. The canonical “let everything through” tag is max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1; the “clamp it down” version sets low numbers and none. Where directives conflict, the most restrictive one wins.

3. The AI-Overviews implication. max-snippet is the documented page-level lever for limiting how much of your content feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode — but it’s not surgical there. Turning max-snippet down (or to 0) limits AI input and shrinks (or removes) your ordinary text snippet, and can knock you out of featured snippets. There’s no “block AI Overviews only” setting among the page directives this article covers. So before reaching for max-snippet:0 to keep content out of AI features, weigh it against the click-through you’ll lose on the regular blue-link result — this is a tradeoff, not a free win. If a true AI-only exclusion is what you actually want, look at Google’s separate property-level Search generative AI control (Search Console) instead — it’s still in limited rollout, but it’s built for exactly that, without the snippet cost.

Test yourself: max-snippet and max-image-preview

Five quick questions on the directive value semantics. Pick an answer for each, then check.

max-snippet & max-image-preview

max-snippet, max-image-preview, and max-video-preview are robots directives that tell Google and Bing how much of a page they may show in a result — the snippet length, image-preview size, and video-preview duration — without affecting whether the page is indexed.

Related: nosnippet & data-nosnippet, Robots Meta Tag, X-Robots-Tag

max-snippet & max-image-preview

max-snippet, max-image-preview, and max-video-preview are robots directives that control how much of a page Google (and Bing) may show in a result — not whether it gets indexed. You set them in the robots <meta> tag or the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, and you can combine all three in one comma-separated directive. They’re the graduated, dial-them-up-or-down cousins of nosnippet / data-nosnippet, which are all-or-nothing.

• max-snippet:[number] caps the text snippet to that many characters. 0 means no text snippet at all — functionally equivalent to nosnippet. -1 lets Google choose the length it thinks works best. It does not affect image or video previews. Importantly, Google states max-snippet also limits how much of the page’s content may be used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode — so 0 doesn’t just remove your text snippet, it also pulls you out of featured-snippet and AI-Overview eligibility.

• max-image-preview:[setting] caps the image preview size. none shows no image preview, standard allows a default-size preview, and large allows a preview up to the width of the viewport. large is what makes a page eligible for big image treatments — including Google Discover, whose current guidance recommends an image at least 1200px wide, over 300,000 total pixels, in a 16:9 ratio. It’s an eligibility enabler, not a ranking signal, and eligibility isn’t a guarantee of appearing.

• max-video-preview:[number] caps the inline video preview in seconds. 0 means at most a static image may be shown (governed by your max-image-preview setting), and -1 means no limit.

If you set none of them, Google decides the snippet length, image size, and video duration on its own. Where rules conflict, the most restrictive one wins (max-snippet:50 plus nosnippet on the same page resolves to nosnippet). And like every robots directive, the page has to stay crawlable for these to be read — don’t block it in robots.txt, or Google never sees the tag. Structured-data rich results and AMP are addressed separately and don’t conform to these caps.

Related: nosnippet & data-nosnippet, Robots Meta Tag, X-Robots-Tag

Changelog