GUIDE

Google-Extended Doesn't Control AI Overviews

26 October 2026 · Mercy Tahitoe

Blocking Google-Extended does not keep a page out of Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode; Search’s own snippet and indexing controls do. Google’s crawler documentation, last updated 15 October 2026, says Google-Extended does not affect a site’s inclusion in Google Search, and its AI features guide names four controls for Search: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex.

Mercy Tahitoe, Studio Head, White Wood, Jakarta.

1. What Google-Extended actually switches off

Google-Extended is a permission token for Gemini, not a crawler you can block from Search. Google’s documentation says it has no user agent of its own: the crawling is done by Google’s usual crawlers, and the token in robots.txt only decides whether that content may be used to train future Gemini models and to ground answers in the Gemini app and in Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. The same page says it is not a ranking signal and does not affect inclusion in Search.

So a site that disallows Google-Extended can still be crawled, indexed, ranked, and shown inside an AI Overview.

2. The controls Search actually follows

AI Overviews and AI Mode are part of Search, so they follow the same controls as a normal search result. Google’s AI features guide says there are no extra requirements to appear in them. A page needs to be indexed and eligible for a snippet to be shown as a supporting link. To limit what Google shows from a page, the guide points to four controls, and the robots meta tag documentation spells out what each one does:

What you wantControlWhat else it changes
Keep a page out of Search entirely, AI features includednoindexThe page disappears from normal results too
Show the page but stop its text feeding AI Overviews and AI ModenosnippetNo text snippet in normal results either
Cap how much text can be usedmax-snippet:[number]The same cap applies to normal snippets; max-snippet:0 equals nosnippet
Hide one passagedata-nosnippet on a span, div or sectionThat passage never shows as a snippet anywhere
Stop Gemini training and Gemini groundingDisallow Google-Extended in robots.txtNothing in Search

None of the controls Google documents removes you from AI Overviews while keeping your normal snippet. Each one trims both.

Two details catch people out. Google reads these tags only if its crawler can open the page, so blocking the page in robots.txt also hides your noindex from Google. And when rules conflict, Google applies the more restrictive one.

3. Other assistants have their own switches

ChatGPT and Perplexity separate search from training, each with its own crawler name. OpenAI’s documentation describes OAI-SearchBot as the crawler for ChatGPT search and GPTBot as the crawler for training, set independently. A site that blocks OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it can still appear as a navigational link. OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to apply.

Perplexity’s documentation says PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in its search results and is not used to train models. Perplexity-User, which fetches a page when a user asks for it, generally ignores robots.txt because the request comes from a person.

4. What we chose for whitewood.ai

We allow every one of these crawlers, training ones included, because being found matters more to a small studio than holding back our text. The whitewood.ai robots.txt names OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended and the others one by one, and allows all of them. In SOLEDAD, White Wood’s AI-monitoring engine, our home page was cited 21 times by Google AI Overview across 3 of our 10 tracked prompts between 18 September and 18 October 2026.

Your answer might differ. A publisher whose income depends on people reading the full article may decide nosnippet on some pages is worth the lost snippet. Make that call page by page, not for the whole domain.

If you change a setting, check the page in Search Console’s URL Inspection tool. Google’s guide warns that a recrawl can take from several days to several months.

What this cannot tell you

These controls decide what an engine may use, not whether it will use you. Allowing every crawler did not put whitewood.ai into most answers: our home page citations came from one engine on 3 prompts. We have not tested nosnippet on our own pages, so we cannot show you what removing a page from AI Overviews does to its clicks. Controls also change; check the date on each source below before you act.

Declared interest: we sell this work at White Wood and track the results in SOLEDAD, the AI-monitoring engine we built.

FAQ

If I block Google-Extended, will my rankings drop?

Google says Google-Extended is not used as a ranking signal and does not affect inclusion in Search.

Can I keep my page in Google but out of ChatGPT search?

Yes. Disallow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt. OpenAI says the page can still appear as a navigational link.

Sources

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