Update: May 21, 2024 – My post is AGAIN in the AI overview, even if Nosnippet is used. I provided Further information can be found below above, including a screenshot.
Update: May 22, 2024 – John Mueller from Google replied to me after checking with the team working on AI overviews. The link card should fall out over time. Find out more below.
Update: May 23, 2024 – As John Mueller explained, it just took a little longer to remove the link card. It has now disappeared from the AI overview. You can see screenshot below.
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Google announced this at Google I/O a few days ago AI overviews would be introduced for users in the United States (more countries coming soon). This goes beyond the Search Generative Experience (SGE) lab experiment launched in May 2023. It’s a big deal as many have been wondering how Google would go about integrating AI into search results. I have had access to SGE since the first day it launched through labs in May and have detailed its evolution, how AI responses were delivered, how ads are handled, and the overall impact on clicks Keep an eye on search results.
Now we have a much better understanding as many more users are seeing AI overviews in search results. And as I expected, Google won’t break down the AI Overview data in Search Console, instead treating it like any other search from a reporting perspective. For example, impressions, clicks and position data are displayed in GSC, but like any other search. Unfortunately, there will be no GSC filter for AI overviews.
The same applies to featured snippets. So you can see the data in GSC, but there won’t be a specific filter for AI overviews. It is worth noting that Google I tested a featured snippets filter in 2016 but never introduced. Since I was in the beta, I was excited to see this filter, but unfortunately it never saw the light of day.
A Disappearing Act: Solutions for Publishers Who Don’t Want AI Overviews!
Some publishers are very upset that Google used their content to train their models. And some of these publishers don’t want AI overviews serving their content (even if Google links to their content). In the past, Google stated that there was no way to disable the display of content in SGE’s AI Overviews because it is a search function. So the only way to unsubscribe would be through normal blocking mechanisms like not indexing content, blocking via robots.txt, etc. But that’s a VERY BIG HAMMER as it will completely remove your content from search.
But they provided another one interesting tidbit After announcing the launch of AI Overviews, they stated: “Preview controls’ work too. And that led to a lot of confusion about how this would actually work (or if it would work at all). By using preview controls, you can either tell Google not to serve a snippet in search results or limit the amount of content that can be used for the snippet. The search snippet is what appears under a title in a listing in the SERPs. Note that I wrote a post about using data-nosnippet to change a snippet in search results, and that is one of the preview controls that site owners can use.
Below I will briefly explain the options available to publishers and then provide a quick case study on using one of the controls to remove my content from an AI synopsis. And just to be clear, I don’t necessarily recommend site owners do this, but many have asked how to remove content from Google’s AI overviews. That’s why I wanted to provide a breakdown of the options available to website owners, while also providing a quick case study of how it works.
Preview controls that allow site owners to limit or remove content from AI overviews:
First, you can use nosnippet to completely remove a snippet from the SERPs. This is also a big hammer as it will impact non-AI overviews too. For example, your default search entry contains a title but no excerpt. It looks fun, is cumbersome, and will probably reduce the click-through rate for you, but hey, you won’t show up in the AI overviews if you don’t want to. I’ll show you what that looks like soon.
Second, you have this Max snippet Control that tells Google to limit the snippet to a specific character length. This applies to all types of search results such as Images, Videos, Discover and more.
And third, you have Data nosnippetwhich I already mentioned. I wrote a post explaining how to use data-nosnippet to remove certain parts of your content from the search snippet (in the default search lists). For example, you can wrap certain content with data-nosnippet to ensure that Google does not use it in the snippet for your search entry.
The experiment: Testing Nosnippet to remove a website’s content from AI Overviews.
It’s great that Google has stated that this can work, but will it actually work if you want to remove your content from an AI overview? I had to test it. So I found one of my older blog posts, used a query that returned the post in an AI summary, then pulled out the big hammer and added it via the meta robots tag “nosnippet”.
First, here is a screenshot of what I always got when searching for this query.
Then I simply added nosnippet via the meta robots tag and requested indexing in Google Search Console. It was quickly re-crawled and re-indexed. But in the search results, my post still showed up in the AI overview and the default snippet showed up in the 10 blue links. I expected that it might take a while for the page to appear in search results as Google’s systems have to recrawl and process the page. I waited patiently.
And just a few hours later, boom, my content was completely removed from the AI overview. My content was left out of the answer, the card with a link to my post was removed, etc. You can see the new AI answer below.
But wait, there is collateral damage when this approach is used. My search entry in the standard search results (10 blue links) does not contain a search snippet. It looks pretty cumbersome and I’m sure it would lower the SERP click-through rate. I used nosnippet versus max-snippet in this experiment, so the other preview controls might produce better results overall.
This is what the default search list now looks like. Pretty anemic, right?
Update: My post is back in the AI overview, even when using Nosnippet:
Well, that was short-lived. My contribution is now back in the AI overview even when using Nosnippet. So the experiment worked initially, but nosnippet is NOT working now. I’ll be forwarding this to Google today to make sure Google understands that the preview controls aren’t working as intended. Check out the screenshot below from my AI Overview post.
Update 2: Response from Google’s John Mueller regarding the situation:
Google’s John Mueller checked in with the team working on AI Overviews and stated that the link card should also be removed from the AI Overview. It may just take a little longer for Google to process this aspect again. John said the problem should be resolved within a few days. I’ll update this post if that happens, just to bring things full circle. But overall, this is great news for any website owner who wants to completely remove their content from AI Overviews.
Update 3: The link card is finally being removed.
As John Mueller explained above, it just took a little longer to remove the link card. Therefore, using Nosnippet seems to be a viable solution for website owners trying to remove their content and links from AI overviews. In the screenshot below you can see that the link card has been removed.
An act of disappearing AI overview. Some final thoughts and questions:
Firstly, it was cool to see how quickly it worked. Within a few hours, my content was removed from an AI overview in search results. Second, I’m not sure how the other preview controls would work if I’m trying to remove or restrict AI overviews that use your content. I may test this and update this post with more information when I do.
Update based on my post back to the AI overview: And thirdly, it was surprising to see my post back in the AI snippet about a week after implementing Nosnippet. Again, I will send this information to Google to make sure Google knows that the preview controls are not working as intended.
So that’s it. A quick and easy way to remove your content (and links) from AI Overviews. Again, I’m not sure how many publishers want to be removed from AI overviews, but there is at least a mechanism for that. Google claims that AI overviews Get more clicks than standard search resultsbut I’m not sure I believe that. Of course, featured snippets can generate a lot of clicks if users don’t get a complete answer from the snippet, but AI Overviews contain a lot more content overall. Time will tell how AI Overviews impact traffic for publishers… But if you’re not comfortable with Google serving your content in its AI Overviews, there are at least some “preview controls” available to help you . As you can see above, these can work quickly.
GG