A robots meta tag speaks to crawlers, not to visitors. It answers questions a robots.txt file cannot, such as whether this specific page should be kept out of the index even though crawling it was allowed, or whether a snippet, a cached copy or a preview image should be withheld from a page that is indexed. Getting a directive wrong is invisible until the page silently disappears from or reappears in results in a way nobody intended.
Everything here runs in your browser. Toggling directives and reading the generated tag involves no request to a server, so you can build markup for an unpublished page without announcing its existence anywhere.
index and follow, the two directives almost every page needs
index and noindex control whether the page itself may appear in search results. follow and nofollow control whether links found on the page should be treated as endorsements for the pages they point to. The default for a page with no robots meta tag at all is index, follow, so this tag is only needed when you want to state one of the four combinations explicitly, most often noindex, follow to remove a page from results while still letting its links pass value onward.
A noindex nofollow meta tag together is a stronger statement, telling a crawler to leave the page out of results and to disregard every link on it. That combination is rare in practice, since most pages that should not be indexed, such as an internal search results page or a thank you page after a form, still contain ordinary navigation links worth following.
noarchive, nosnippet and the other robots meta directives
noarchive prevents Google from offering a cached copy of the page. nosnippet prevents any text snippet or video preview from being shown under the result at all, which is a blunt instrument since it also suppresses a rich result that might otherwise have displayed. notranslate asks Google not to offer an automatic translation of the page in results for users who search in a different language.
These are worth reaching for only when a specific, deliberate reason exists, for example a legal notice whose exact wording matters and should never be paraphrased in a cached or translated form. Applying them by default across a whole site removes chances to be shown well in results for no real benefit.
- noarchive: no cached copy link is offered for this page.
- nosnippet: no text snippet, video preview or image preview is shown at all.
- notranslate: no offer to auto translate the page in results.
- noimageindex: images on this page are not indexed via Google Images.
max-snippet, max-image-preview and max-video-preview explained
max-snippet takes a number of characters, or the value -1 for no limit or 0 to disable a text snippet entirely, and caps how much text Google may show under the result. max-image-preview takes none, standard or large, controlling the largest thumbnail size Google may use in a rich visual result. max-video-preview takes a number of seconds, or -1 for no limit or 0 for a static image only, capping how much of an on page video may play as a preview.
These three exist because Google's default behaviour for large, richly formatted pages is to be generous with preview size, which is usually desirable but is occasionally a reason to hold back, for example a paywalled article that wants to limit how much of the full text is visible before a subscription wall.
How this robots meta tag generator differs from an x-robots-tag generator
The meta tag this tool builds only works inside an HTML page's head, since a crawler has to actually parse the HTML to see it. A non HTML resource such as a PDF, an image or a downloadable file has no head element to put a meta tag in, and for those an X-Robots-Tag HTTP response header carrying the identical directive values is the equivalent mechanism, set at the server or CDN level rather than in markup.
The directive names and values are exactly the same between the two, index, noindex, nofollow, noarchive and the rest, so once you understand the meta tag version you already understand the header version. Only the delivery mechanism differs.
Combining directives correctly in one robots meta tag generator output
Every selected directive is combined into a single comma separated content attribute value, since a page is only ever allowed one meta robots tag targeting all crawlers. Adding a second, conflicting meta robots tag lower in the page does not override the first. Crawlers are documented to take the most restrictive combination of every meta robots tag they find, so a stray noindex left in a template can quietly override an index you intended elsewhere on the same page.
This tool always produces one tag with every chosen directive present, which avoids that failure mode entirely by construction rather than relying on you to remember not to duplicate the tag.
How to generate a robots meta tag
- 1
Choose index or noindex
Decide whether this specific page should be eligible to appear in search results at all.
- 2
Choose follow or nofollow
Decide whether links on this page should be treated as passing value to the pages they point to.
- 3
Add optional directives
Toggle noarchive, nosnippet, notranslate or set max-snippet, max-image-preview and max-video-preview if needed.
- 4
Copy the generated tag
Copy the single combined meta tag and paste it into the head of the page it applies to.
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Sources and further reading
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about the robots meta tag generator.
Crawlers combine every meta robots tag found on a page and apply the most restrictive value for each directive across all of them, rather than letting a later tag override an earlier one. A stray noindex left in a shared template fragment can therefore silently suppress an index directive set elsewhere, which is why this generator always produces exactly one combined tag.
Usually yes, for the pages where it matters. robots.txt controls whether a crawler is allowed to fetch a URL at all, while a robots meta tag controls what happens to a page the crawler has already fetched, such as whether to index it. Blocking a page in robots.txt actually prevents a crawler from ever seeing its noindex tag, so the two need to be used carefully together rather than interchangeably.
nosnippet removes any text snippet, video preview or image preview Google would otherwise show under the result entirely. It is a blunt directive: it also removes any rich result treatment the page might have qualified for, since those rely on the same preview mechanism, so reach for it only when withholding a preview is genuinely the goal.
They carry identical directive values, index, noindex, nofollow and the rest, but the meta tag only works inside an HTML page's head, while the header works for any resource including PDFs, images and downloads that have no head element to place a tag in. The header is set at the server or CDN level instead of in the page markup.
Functionally they produce the same visible result: no text snippet under the listing. nosnippet also blocks video and image previews at the same time, while max-snippet 0 only addresses the text snippet specifically, leaving image and video preview limits controlled by their own separate max-image-preview and max-video-preview directives.