# Meta robots

Canonical HTML: /atlas/meta-robots
Atlas version: atlas-2026-07-28-v1
Category: Crawler and indexing directives

## Definition

A meta robots element gives indexing and following instructions inside an HTML page that has already been fetched.

## How it works

Common directives include index, noindex, follow, nofollow, noarchive, and snippet controls. Support and interpretation can differ by crawler product.

## How to validate it

Inspect the final rendered head and response headers, then separate successful fetching from subsequent indexing behavior.

## Common failure

Blocking a page in robots.txt can prevent a crawler from seeing the noindex instruction placed inside that page.

## Related topics

- [robots.txt](/atlas/robots-txt)
- [X-Robots-Tag](/atlas/x-robots-tag)