Skip to content
Rankora
Free · no account needed

Meta Robots & X-Robots-Tag Checker

Enter a URL, or paste the HTML and headers: the tool reads every robots directive, spots contradictions and explains what each one does.

Privacy and cost

This tool requests the public URL you enter from our servers. It is free, rate-limited to prevent abuse, and we do not store the URL or the page content.

How it works

  1. Enter the page URL, or paste its HTML and, if you have them, the HTTP response headers.
  2. The tool extracts meta robots tags (plus googlebot, bingbot…) and X-Robots-Tag headers.
  3. It computes the effective result using the "most restrictive wins" rule and details each directive.

Example

A page with <meta name="robots" content="index, follow, max-image-preview:large"> and the header "X-Robots-Tag: noindex" is flagged: index and noindex contradict, the header and the tag disagree, and the effective result is noindex with links followed. The tool adds that noindex is only seen if the page is not blocked by robots.txt.

What the result means

Google combines every applicable directive and keeps the most restrictive: a single noindex, wherever it comes from (tag or header), is enough to drop the page from results. Crawler-specific directives (googlebot) add to the generic "robots" tag.

Common problems this tool helps with

  • A noindex left by mistake in a theme or a server header after launch.
  • An SEO plugin and the server sending different directives for the same page.
  • Several meta robots tags or invalid values (max-snippet:abc) that are silently ignored.
  • A noindex on a page blocked by robots.txt, which Google therefore cannot read.

Frequently asked questions

Does the X-Robots-Tag header override the tag?

Neither wins by default: Google applies the most restrictive combination of both. If either says noindex, the page leaves the index.

Does the tool see JavaScript-rendered HTML?

No. It reads the raw HTML the server returns, like a crawler's first step. A noindex added by JavaScript will not show up here.

Why paste headers by hand?

In URL mode the tool reads the response headers directly. Paste mode is for a local page, a protected environment, or to test a configuration before you publish it.