nosnippet and snippet controls

Google's decision to reuse snippet controls for AI answers turned a set of forgotten meta tags into AI visibility policy, and old settings deserve re-reading in that light. A nosnippet added in 2019 to stop competitors scraping your comparison table now also forbids AI Overviews from quoting the page; an aggressive max-snippet cap trims what the AI can reproduce; a noindex removes you from the answer layer along with the results page. These controls are the legitimate opt-out lever, and businesses with real reasons, paywalled analysis, licensed data, can use them with precision thanks to data-nosnippet's element-level scope. But partial, unconsidered restrictions mostly backfire for anyone who wants customers: the query still gets answered, the AI Overview still appears, and the quoted space your page vacated is filled by a rival who allowed it. The audit is one crawl of your templates for snippet directives, one question per finding: is this restriction a decision we would make again, now that it also governs the answers?