Nosnippet
BusinessnosnippetNosnippet is an Agent Skill for business published in the thedaviddias/Front-End-Checklist repository on GitHub: a SKILL.md instruction file an AI agent can load to do this task.
Use when auditing robots meta tags. Applies to any important landing page, article, or product page that should appear with a description in search results.
How to use this skill
Bring this guide into your coding agent with a prompt tailored to the tool you use.
- Open your project in Codex.
- Copy and paste the prompt below.
- Review files and risks before approving any action.
Inspect the Agent Skill at https://github.com/thedaviddias/Front-End-Checklist/blob/HEAD/skills/nosnippet/SKILL.md and all supporting files. Report provenance, permissions, scripts, dependencies, and security risks. Propose an exact installation into .agents/skills/nosnippet, but wait for my approval before writing files or running scripts.
Copying this prompt does not install or run the skill. Review third-party files before use.
Avoid nosnippet on important pages
Pages with nosnippet display without a description in search results, reducing click-through rates and making it harder for users to understand whether the result is relevant to their query.
Quick Reference
- nosnippet prevents Google from showing a description under your title in search results
- Pages without snippets have significantly lower click-through rates
- Use max-snippet:-1 to explicitly allow unlimited snippet length instead
- Only use nosnippet deliberately on legally sensitive content
Check
Check the tag and X-Robots-Tag response header for each important page. Flag any that contain 'nosnippet' or 'max-snippet:0'. Confirm these pages intentionally suppress snippets.
Fix
Remove 'nosnippet' from the content attribute on important pages. Replace with 'max-snippet:-1' to explicitly allow full-length snippets, or simply omit snippet directives to use the default (allowed).
Explain
The nosnippet directive tells Google not to display a text snippet (description) for your page in search results. Without a snippet, users see only the page title and URL—this reduces click-through rates and is rarely the intended behaviour for content pages.
Code Review
Check all pages for tags. Parse the content value and flag any that include 'nosnippet' or 'max-snippet:0'. Generate a report of affected URLs, their page type, and whether the nosnippet directive is intentional. Also check X-Robots-Tag response headers.
For full implementation details, code examples, and framework-specific guidance,
see references/rule.md.
Rule page: https://frontendchecklist.io/en/rules/seo/nosnippet