AI + Search Exposure Inspection

noindex

A directive, in a meta tag or an HTTP header, telling search systems to keep this page out of their index.

Also known as Indexing directive. Updated .

What it means

It appears two ways: a meta robots tag in the document head, or an X-Robots-Tag response header. Both work. The header version is easier to miss because it never shows up in view-source.

The part a short definition leaves out

The most common noindex is the one nobody chose. It gets set during a staging build, applied by a plugin to a whole content type, or inherited from a template someone copied. QuickRankAI checks both locations for exactly this reason.

Where this comes from

Related terms

  • robots.txt A plain text file at the site root telling crawlers which parts of the site they may request.
  • Canonical URL A declaration naming which URL is the real address of a page, so duplicate variants do not compete with each other.
  • Quick Fix A finding that can be repaired at the page, template, or configuration level without changing how the site is built.

See whether this is costing you anything

The inspection reports on this signal directly, alongside thirty-seven others, and tells you whether it is a quick fix on your site or something deeper.

Run a Quick Inspection Full glossary