{
  "schemaVersion": "crawler-atlas-1",
  "atlasVersion": "atlas-2026-07-28-v1",
  "canonical": "/atlas/meta-robots",
  "title": "Meta robots",
  "category": {
    "slug": "directives",
    "title": "Crawler and indexing directives"
  },
  "definition": "A meta robots element gives indexing and following instructions inside an HTML page that has already been fetched.",
  "mechanism": "Common directives include index, noindex, follow, nofollow, noarchive, and snippet controls. Support and interpretation can differ by crawler product.",
  "validation": "Inspect the final rendered head and response headers, then separate successful fetching from subsequent indexing behavior.",
  "commonFailure": "Blocking a page in robots.txt can prevent a crawler from seeing the noindex instruction placed inside that page.",
  "related": [
    "/atlas/robots-txt",
    "/atlas/x-robots-tag"
  ],
  "modified": "2026-07-28"
}