sus.botdocs

AI finding

Snippet and reuse controls contradict each other or the page's own markup

AI Warning Severity: Medium

Part of the audit Snippet and reuse controls contradict each other. Finding id: ai.snippetControlConflicts.

What it costs you

Google documents that nosnippet, and max-snippet:0 which is equivalent, show no text snippet in any form of search result and keep the content out of AI Overviews and AI Mode as direct input. The markup on the page asks for the opposite.

What to do

Decide per page whether it may be quoted, then say so once: the same directive in the meta tag, the header and every language version.

What it checks

  • Quoting banned on pages with question data
  • Snippet length limit differs between sources
  • Reuse reserved in header but bots allowed
  • Quoting rules differ between language versions

How to fix it

Back the reservation with robots.txt rules

  1. If reuse is reserved on purpose, disallow the AI crawlers in robots.txt as well.
  2. If the header was added by a default of the server or CDN and is not meant, remove it.

How to check: curl -sI the URL and look for tdm-reservation; fetch /robots.txt. Then run this rule again.

Set the directive in one place

  1. Keep either the robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag header. The header is usually set by the server or CDN, the meta tag by the CMS.

How to check: curl -sI the URL and look for x-robots-tag; view the source for the robots meta tag. Then run this rule again.

Give every language version the same directives

  1. Compare the robots meta tag and the X-Robots-Tag header of [page url] and [other url].
  2. Set both versions to the directives you want.

How to check: Run this rule again after the next crawl.

Remove the snippet restriction or the markup

  1. If the page is meant to be quoted: remove nosnippet and max-snippet:0 from the robots meta tag and from the X-Robots-Tag header.
  2. If it is not: remove the question-and-answer or how-to markup, which serves no purpose on a page that may not be quoted.

How to check: curl -sI the URL and look for x-robots-tag; view the source for the robots meta tag. Then run this rule again.

How to verify by hand

Search Console impressions for the page in rich and AI result types.

What this relies on

A page with question-and-answer markup is meant to be quoted.