Robots meta tag checker

This checker parses the tag’s content value, explains each recognized directive in plain English, summarizes the resulting index and link-following signals, and calls out direct conflicts such as index with noindex. It also validates parameterized controls for snippets and previews. Unknown or malformed tokens produce an error, so a typo cannot disappear behind an apparently successful report.

Read the tag as a set of crawler instructions

Paste only the content value from the robots meta element, for example noindex, follow, max-snippet:120. The checker separates comma-delimited tokens, ignores harmless differences in capitalization and surrounding whitespace, and returns a normalized form. Every directive receives its own explanation, so the result is useful even when you did not write the original markup. Index and noindex address whether the page may appear in search results. Follow and nofollow address whether crawlers should follow links found on the page. The aliases all and none carry two meanings at once: all represents index plus follow, while none represents noindex plus nofollow. Other instructions control cached copies, snippets, translations, image indexing, preview sizes, or removal after a specified date. This tool interprets the supplied tag value; it does not fetch the page or claim that every crawler implements every instruction identically. That separation keeps the report precise: it explains the syntax and its internal consistency without pretending to observe external search-engine behavior.

Find contradictions before they reach production

Conflicting directives commonly appear when templates, plugins, and page-level overrides all contribute to one tag. A value containing index and noindex says both that a page may appear and that it must not appear. Follow with nofollow creates the same problem for links. Conflicts can also hide behind shorthand: all contradicts noindex or nofollow, while none contradicts index or follow. The checker expands those meanings during analysis and lists each contradiction with a focused explanation. It also reports an effective summary for indexing and following, using allowed, disallowed, or unspecified. That summary is convenient for automated reviews, but the conflict list remains the important signal: contradictory markup should be corrected at its source rather than treated as a reliable precedence rule. Run the check on generated values in tests or deployment workflows to catch configuration drift. Because an unknown token fails the request, misspellings such as nofolow cannot be mistaken for valid crawler controls. Fixing the tag becomes an explicit task instead of a silent SEO risk.

Validate snippet and preview limits accurately

Robots metadata can do more than switch indexing on or off. Max-snippet accepts a nonnegative character limit or -1 for no limit. Max-video-preview similarly accepts a number of seconds, zero to prevent a preview, or -1 for no limit. Max-image-preview accepts only none, standard, or large. The checker validates these forms and explains the chosen value instead of returning an opaque string. It also recognizes unavailable_after when it includes a parseable date, along with noarchive, nocache, nosnippet, notranslate, and noimageindex. If a parameter is missing, misspelled, or outside its permitted shape, the entire input is rejected as invalid. This strict behavior is useful in content management systems and CI pipelines because success means every supplied token was understood. Use the normalized output for review and logging, but preserve your original source configuration as the system of record. Finally, remember that robots metadata is a crawler request, not access control: private or sensitive material still needs authentication and authorization, regardless of whether a noindex directive is present.