Checks
Noindex directives
Checks each page for a noindex directive in meta robots or the X-Robots-Tag header, either of which removes it from search results entirely regardless of content quality.
What this check looks for
This check inspects <meta name="robots"> and <meta name="googlebot"> for a noindex or none token, and separately checks the X-Robots-Tag response header for the same. Any match fails, quoting the exact source and directive found. No noindex directive found anywhere passes.
Why it matters
A noindex directive is a direct, unambiguous instruction telling search engines to drop the page from their index — no amount of great content, backlinks, or structured data overrides it. It's frequently left behind by accident: a staging-environment header that made it into production, a CMS default that noindexes drafts and was never flipped for the published version, or a plugin setting nobody remembers configuring. Since noindex is meant to exclude a page from automated consumption altogether, any AI crawler respecting the same directive will skip the page too — a page you want indexed and cited needs this check to come back clean.
How to fix it
Remove the noindex directive from any page that should be discoverable:
<!-- Blocks indexing -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
<!-- Fixed: page is indexable -->
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">Check response headers too, since a header-level X-Robots-Tag: noindex set at the server or CDN config level overrides page-level markup and is easy to miss during a review:
X-Robots-Tag: noindexSee how your site scores on this check