What is the meta robots tag?

An HTML tag that tells search engines whether a page may be indexed and whether its links may be followed.

Updated 23 October 2026

Definition

The meta robots tag sits in a page's <head> and gives crawlers instructions about that page:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

Value	Meaning
`noindex`	Don't show this page in search results
`nofollow`	Don't follow the links on this page
`noarchive`	Don't show a cached copy
`nosnippet`	Don't show a text snippet

The crawler must be able to fetch the page to see the tag. If robots.txt blocks the page, the tag is never read.
For files that aren't HTML, such as PDFs, use the X-Robots-Tag header.

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