Google lists the ways to keep pages out of AI answers
The help page now gathers the existing settings in one place, and nothing about your site has changed.
Google updated its "Control what you share with Google Search" help document, Barry Schwartz reported. The page now lists existing options together, including the robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, the X-Robots-Tag, and the Search generative AI control.
include existing options such as the robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, X-Robots-Tag, and the Search generative AI control
These are settings site owners can use to tell Google what it may show from their pages. None of them are new. Schwartz says the update adds them to the help document, so the change is to Google's documentation, not to how your website behaves. If you have never touched any of these settings, nothing about your site changed today.
Why a help page update matters
Most small business owners will never edit one of these tags. They sit in your page's code or your server settings, and plenty of site owners have no idea the controls exist at all. That is the point of the update. Google has pulled the scattered options into one document so anyone trying to limit what Google shows can find them in the same place.
The one that gets attention is the Search generative AI control, which relates to Google's AI answers. Publishers have spent the past year asking how to stay out of those answers, and the short version is that the controls already existed. Google has now written them down together.
What to do
For almost every small business, the answer is do nothing. Appearing in Google, including in AI answers, is usually how people find you. Blocking snippets can mean blocking the thing that gets you clicked.
If you do want to limit what Google shows from a page, read Google's updated help document before you change anything, and make the change on one page first rather than across your whole site. A tag applied site wide by mistake can quietly pull you out of results you want to be in.
Google has not said whether more controls are coming. The source only describes the documentation update, so there is nothing further to read into it yet.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.