Google gives you three tags that keep a price off your search listing, and Google’s page on AI features points at those three, plus noindex, as the way to limit what shows from your pages. You can hide one line or you can hide the whole page. What you cannot do is hide the number from Google’s AI answers and keep it in your normal search listing, and that trade is the whole story here.
The three tags and what each one does
Google Search Central lists all three on one page, “Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications”, last updated March 24, 2026.
- nosnippet. Google’s wording: “Do not show a text snippet or video preview in the search results for this page.” The page says this applies to web search, Google Images, Discover, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and will also prevent the content being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- max-snippet, followed by a number. The number is a character limit on the snippet. Google says 0 is the same as nosnippet. It does not say -1 removes the limit. Google’s wording for -1 is that it will choose the snippet length “that it believes is most effective to help users discover your content”.
- data-nosnippet. This one is not a page setting. It is an attribute you put on a piece of the page, so the rest of the page still shows normally.
The first two cover the whole page. If two rules disagree, Google says the more restrictive one wins, and gives its own example: a page carrying both max-snippet:50 and nosnippet gets treated as nosnippet.
Hide the price line, not the page
For most trades, data-nosnippet is the one you actually want. Wrap the number, leave the rest of the page alone.
Google says the attribute is valid on three elements: span, div and section. Its own example puts the attribute on a made up tag and labels that line “NOT VALID: not a span, div, or section”.
Two details on that page catch people out.
- Any value you type is ignored. Google’s examples show data-nosnippet=“false” hiding the block exactly the same as data-nosnippet=“true”. It is on or off, not true or false.
- The tag has to be closed properly. Google’s example warns that an unclosed div takes in everything after it, so one missing closing tag can strip the description off the rest of your page.
Google also says not to add or remove the attribute with scripts. It usually renders a page in order to index it but does not promise to, so it may pick the attribute up before rendering, after rendering, or both. The attribute needs to sit in the file itself.
Bing takes the same attribute. The Bing Webmaster Blog announced it on October 15, 2025, in a post titled “Bing Introduces Support for the data-nosnippet HTML Attribute”. Bing says content marked that way is “still indexed normally” and “is available for ranking”, and names its own AI answers among the places that content will not show. Bing says you can put the attribute on any HTML element, while Google names only three. Use a div, a span or a section and both are satisfied.
You do need to be able to edit the block that holds the price. Some page builders will not let you add an attribute to a block at all, which is a limit of the tool and not of the tag. Sites built as plain HTML files let you put it exactly where the number sits.
The price can still leave by another door
Hiding the visible price does not always hide the price.
Your site may carry a second copy of its page facts in code that search engines read directly, the kind that hands over a business type, an address, opening hours and sometimes a price. Google’s page is blunt about this. That code “remains usable for search results when declared within a data-nosnippet element”. If the number is in there too, it is still being handed over.
That second copy opens the other gap as well. Google says a max-snippet limit does not apply where a publisher has separately granted permission for the content to be used, and it names two ways that happens: the publisher supplies the content as in-page markup, or the publisher has a license agreement with Google. A license agreement with Google is not the one to worry about. The markup is the one your own site might be carrying, so read that second copy before you decide the number is hidden.
If you are not sure what your site publishes in that second copy, that is its own job, and it is covered in what code a plumbing or roofing site should carry.
What turning the snippet off costs you
None of this is free, and the bill is bigger than most people expect.
Google’s page on snippets, last updated April 20, 2026, says snippets are “automatically created from page content”. That snippet is the gray text under your blue link. Set nosnippet on a page and that text is gone from every search the page shows up for, not only the ones about price.
The second cost is worth reading twice. Google’s page on AI features, last updated December 10, 2025, says a page “must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet” before it can be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page you have set to nosnippet is not eligible. Keeping the price out that way keeps the page out too.
Wrapping one block in data-nosnippet does not have that problem. The page still shows a snippet, and only the wrapped part is off the table.
If hiding the whole site is what you are really after, Google has a switch for that now, and what the Search Console opt out actually does covers what it removes and who should leave it alone.
This is not legal or tax advice. Hiding a number from a search listing does not change any rule your state has about how you advertise a price, and your own state licensing board or your own attorney is the right place for that question.
It takes weeks, and here is how to check
Google’s page on AI features says to allow time for it to recrawl and process the change, and that “crawling can take anywhere from several days to several months, depending on how often our systems determine a page needs to be refreshed”. You can ask for a recrawl. You cannot make it happen today.
To see whether the tag is really there, Google points to the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, to “see the HTML that Googlebot received while crawling the page”. That is the only version that counts. What your browser shows you can differ from it.
Once the change is live, watch the page rather than the code. Where traffic from AI answers shows up covers which reports hold those numbers and what they leave out.
What to do next
- Decide what you are hiding, and whether the number belongs on the page at all. One price block, or every snippet on that page. Those are very different choices with very different costs.
- For one block, wrap it in a div carrying the data-nosnippet attribute, and check the closing tag is there.
- Leave the rest of the page alone so your listing keeps its description.
- Read the second copy of your page facts and look for the same number sitting in it.
- Run the page through URL Inspection and confirm the attribute is in the HTML Google got, not just in your editor.
- Wait weeks, not hours, then look again.
One honest limit before you start. These are Google’s controls, and Google’s pages describe Google. Bing takes the same attribute. Other assistants publish their own rules, or none at all. And every one of these changes waits on a crawl, so nothing you edit this morning changes an answer this afternoon.
If you would rather see what is being said before you change anything, the free scan asks the assistants the questions your customers ask and writes down who gets named. It is a check and not a fix.