Manage robot meta tags an limit AI Overview from using page contents

Purpose

This feature provides two main improvements.

Allows the management of <meta name="robots"....> tags using front matter.
Allows the management of the meta tags related to SEO AI Summary creation.

Considerations when enabling this feature for AI Summary control

Enabling this features may impact how your site or pages are indexed. This will depend on how the various search engines react to having the AI Overview denied access to page content. I would suggest you read some of the references at the end of this post.

Configuration

There are three areas where configuration is obtained.

hugo.toml
Only loaded if the page is part of the mainSection
The page’s parent if there is a _index.md
The page it self

The loading order is hugo.toml -> _index.md -> page. This means that:

_index.md overrides hugo.toml if different values exist for the same key
page overrides _index.md if values exist the same key

hugo.toml

[Params.seo.robots]
ai-summary-limit = "nosnippet"
noindex = true
nofollow = true

[Params.seo.GoogleBot]
noindex = true
ai-summary-limit = 50

When the above configuration is used, pages that are part of mainSection will have the following meta tag inserted witin their <head></head>.

<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, max-snippet:50">

Pages that are not part of mainSection will not have any tags, but you can set these tags or override them by setting the required params in the page’s own front matter.

NOTE: Additional search engine bots can be added. e.g. DuckDuckbot

Options for summaryLimit

none # No Limit: max-snippet will not be added to the robot tag
nosnippet # No snippet permitted equivalent to 0
Any positive numerical value, 0, 50, 150, 300 and more

Page Overrides

The tag defaults that you define in hugo.toml can be overridden on a page by page bases. Within the Front Matter add the following.

seo:
  robots:
    ai-summary-limit: none
  GoogleBot:
    noindex: false

With the above settings:

robots will not be added as no limit is the default
GoogleBot will only contain the max-snippet value

<meta name="googlebot" content="max-snippet:50">

Selective application of nosnippet around selected test

There is also a defined standard way to tell search engines not to use a portion of a page when generating a summary.

This portion of the page is not to be used as part of the summary creation.

This is done by calling the shortcode of the same name. This wraps the text in a div pair.

References