Free · Snippet controls checker

Free snippet controls checker: is your homepage eligible to appear in Google's AI answers?

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode can only quote pages that are indexed and snippet-eligible. Paste a domain and we fetch its homepage once, read the snippet controls Google documents, and name the exact directive that decides. No signup.

no signup · one page read · about five seconds
noindexnosnippetmax-snippetdata-nosnippetX-Robots-Tag

A readiness check on one page's public signals, not a measurement of whether AI answers quote you. A page that passes can still go unquoted; that is what the full grade and the ClarAI product look at.

The four controls Google documents

Google's page on AI features and your website lists the same controls that govern ordinary search snippets as the controls that govern what AI Overviews and AI Mode can show. There is no separate switch for AI, and no separate requirement to meet.

Controls that block

  • noindex removes the page from the Search index that Google's AI features draw from. none is equivalent to noindex, nofollow.
  • nosnippet removes the page's text from snippets, which is the eligibility gate; max-snippet:0 does the same.

Controls that restrict

  • max-snippet:N caps how many characters of the page can be quoted. -1 means no limit.
  • data-nosnippet, an HTML attribute, hides a section of a page from snippets while leaving the rest eligible.
  • All of these can also arrive as an X-Robots-Tag response header, which is why the checker reads the headers as well as the HTML.

Why this matters is the subject of Snippet controls are your AI visibility off switch and the summary of Google's guidance in Google's AI search guide: what actually matters.

What this does not measure

  • Whether any AI answer quotes, mentions or cites the site. Eligibility is a readiness gate, not a result.
  • Any page other than the homepage. Snippet controls are set per page; the ClarAI site audit reads every page in the sitemap.
  • Whether the page is indexed, or whether Googlebot is allowed. Those are separate gates; the free grade and the crawler policy checker cover them.
  • The Search Console setting, Search generative AI, that can exclude a whole property from AI Overviews and AI Mode. It is invisible from outside; confirm it reads Include.

Also free: the AI crawler policy checker (robots.txt, by role), the full readiness grade, and the AI visibility checker explainer.

Questions

What does this checker actually read?
One page: https://yourdomain/, fetched once with a normal browser user agent and held in memory for 24 hours so a repeat check costs nothing. It reads the robots meta tag (including a googlebot-named one), the X-Robots-Tag response header, and counts elements carrying data-nosnippet. It does not crawl other pages and it writes nothing to a database.
Why is snippet eligibility the gate for Google's AI features?
Because Google says so. Its AI features page states that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and lists nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex as the controls that govern what those features can show. A page must be indexed and snippet-eligible to be quoted; a snippet control that removes the text removes the page from the pool.
What do yes, restricted and blocked mean?
Blocked: a directive removes the page or its text entirely (noindex, none, nosnippet or max-snippet:0). Restricted: the page can be quoted but less of it, either a max-snippet below 100 characters or one or more data-nosnippet sections. Yes: none of those were found. The 100-character threshold is the one the ClarAI readiness grader uses, so the two tools agree.
Does a max-snippet of -1 or a large number hurt?
No. -1 means no limit and is ignored. A limit at or above 100 characters is reported as a cap on quote length but still reads as eligible. A limit below 100 reads as restricted, because Google can quote only that many characters of the page.
The check says yes. Am I in AI Overviews now?
Not necessarily. Eligibility is a gate, not a result. Google also has to have indexed the page, Googlebot has to be allowed, and Google chooses what to quote. There is also a Search Console setting, Search generative AI, that lets a property owner exclude a site from AI Overviews and AI Mode; it is invisible from outside, so confirm it reads Include. This tool never measures whether an answer actually quotes you.
Why only the homepage?
To keep the check free, fast and harmless to the site being checked: one request, no crawl. Snippet controls are set per page, so run the same check mentally on the pages that matter most, or use the site audit inside ClarAI, which reads every page in the sitemap.
Do you store the domains people check?
The result is held in the server's memory for 24 hours so a repeat check is free, and it is dropped after that. No account is created, no email is asked for, and nothing is written to a database.

Sources

Every claim about a crawler or a control on this page is limited to what the operator's own document states.

  1. Google, AI features and your website (the snippet controls that apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
  2. Google, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
  3. Google, Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag
  4. Google Search Console Help, Search generative AI control: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139

Eligible is the gate. Grade the rest free.

The full readiness grade checks snippet eligibility together with Googlebot access, indexing signals, structured data and the other technical gates Google documents. No signup, about twenty seconds.

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