You capped your own quote
at 160 characters,
and forgot.
Search engines apply a default limit to how much of your page they may show, designed for a results page with ten blue links. An engine assembling an answer works under the same instruction. RankReady lifts the cap with one robots directive, merged into whatever robots meta tag your site already emits rather than adding a second one.
v1.3.1 · 300 active installs · Tested to WordPress 7.1 · Runs alongside Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress
The before and after,
measured with curl.
Feature off, the tag reads max-image-preview:large. Feature on, it reads max-image-preview:large, max-snippet:-1, max-video-preview:-1. Note what did not happen: there is still exactly one robots meta tag on the page.
max-snippet:-1
Removes the character limit on text, so an engine may show the whole passage rather than a truncated one that gets paraphrased away from you.
max-image-preview:large
Allows a full size image preview. WordPress core emits this one by default, so it is the other two that are the change.
max-video-preview:-1
The same removal of a cap, applied to video previews.
A second robots tag
resolves to the stricter one.
If your site runs an SEO plugin, that plugin owns the robots meta tag and disables the core one. A plugin echoing its own tag on wp_head produces two with different contents, and a crawler resolving the conflict picks the more restrictive, which is the opposite of the intent.
It merges instead of echoing
RankReady filters WordPress core's robots output when core renders the tag, and hooks Yoast's, Rank Math's and AIOSEO's own robots filters when they have taken it over.
It stays out of the way when it should
A post marked noindex by your SEO plugin is left alone entirely, because lifting a snippet cap on a page you asked not to be indexed is meaningless.
A site wide default
Set once and forget, which for most informational blogs is the correct configuration.
A per post override
For the pages where you genuinely do want a cap: gated content, a members area teaser, anything where the full passage being quotable defeats the purpose of the page.
Applies on singular views
Posts and pages, governed by the site default plus the per post override.
Verifiable in one command
Grep the robots meta tag out of your own page before and after. This is the rare feature where the proof takes ten seconds.
This permits.
It does not compel.
Removing a restriction is not the same as creating an outcome, and the trade is real.
Nothing obliges an engine to quote you
max-snippet:-1 says it may show the whole passage. Nothing says it must, and nothing obliges an AI engine to use you at all.
Nothing here changes rankings
These are display directives. They govern how much of your page may be shown, not where your page sits.
Compliance varies by engine
Google documents these directives. Whether every AI crawler honours them is not something a plugin can observe, and no compliance rate is published here that we have not measured.
There is a genuine trade-off
An unlimited snippet means an engine can show more of your answer without the reader clicking. On a page whose job is to be the answer, that is what you want. On a page whose job is to sell, think about it first.
The honest answers,
before you have to ask.
Q. Will this duplicate the robots meta tag my SEO plugin outputs?
No. That is the specific failure this implementation exists to avoid. RankReady merges into the existing tag through the relevant filter, so the page carries one tag whichever plugin owns it.
Q. Does max-snippet:-1 hurt my click-through rate?
It can, on pages where the full answer being visible removes the reason to click. That is why the per post override exists. On informational posts, being the quoted passage is usually the better trade.
Q. What about noindex pages?
Left alone. If Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO or SEOPress has marked a post noindex, RankReady adds nothing to it.
Q. Is this the same as the Yoast setting?
Yoast and the others expose their own snippet controls. If you have already set yours, this changes nothing and conflicts with nothing. It exists so sites without an SEO plugin get the same directive.
Q. Does it apply to pages as well as posts?
It applies on singular views, and the site wide default plus per post override govern which ones.
Q. How long does setup take?
About five minutes for the whole plugin. This particular feature is one toggle.
Make your site readable
to the things reading it.
RankReady is a WordPress AI SEO plugin. It runs alongside Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress rather than replacing any of them, and setup takes about five minutes from your dashboard.
Free, no account, no credit card · GPL-2.0 · About five minutes from your dashboard