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SEO Madmanby Adam Hafez
Free tool

Robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag validator

Validate robots meta tags and X-Robots-Tag headers against the rules Google documents, and see the combined result for Googlebot.

Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged or stored.

Nothing you paste here is sent anywhere; it is parsed in your browser only.

    Key takeaways

    • Google documents the robots meta tag names robots, googlebot and googlebot-news, and treats the header, agent name and values as case insensitive.
    • When robots rules conflict, Google applies the more restrictive one, so nosnippet wins over max-snippet.
    • The none rule is equivalent to noindex combined with nofollow, so listing both alongside it is redundant.
    • The max-image-preview rule accepts only none, standard or large, and max-snippet and max-video-preview take a whole number of at least minus one.
    • The noarchive rule no longer controls anything in Google Search, because the cached link feature it governed has been removed.

    What it takes

    • Robots meta tags, pasted as HTML
    • X-Robots-Tag header lines

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    How to use it

    1. 1Paste your tags and header linesOne per line. Both a full meta tag and an X-Robots-Tag line work, and you can mix them to see how a page's HTML and its HTTP headers combine.
    2. 2Read the combined Googlebot resultThe box at the top merges every entry that applies to Googlebot, meaning tags for all crawlers or for googlebot, and applies the more restrictive rule where they conflict.
    3. 3Fix anything marked as an errorErrors are rules Google would not parse, such as max-image-preview with a value it does not accept, or unavailable_after with no readable date.
    4. 4Check the warningsA warning marks a rule outside Google's documented list, a repeated rule, or an unavailable_after date that has already passed.
    5. 5Put user agent names in the header, not the ruleA header such as X-Robots-Tag with a googlebot prefix targets that crawler only, while a header without a prefix applies to all of them.

    A robots meta tag and an X-Robots-Tag header do the same job in two places, and a page can carry both. This tool checks them against the rule list Google publishes, and it runs in your browser without sending anything anywhere. It is the checking counterpart to a builder: you bring the tags that already exist, and it tells you whether they mean what you think.

    Where a page’s rules come from

    The meta tag lives in the HTML, and the header travels with the HTTP response. The header is the only option for files that have no HTML, such as PDFs and images. Google documents that when rules conflict, the more restrictive one applies, so a header saying noindex outweighs a meta tag that says nothing of the kind. Paste both to see the merged outcome instead of reasoning it out by hand.

    What counts as valid

    The validator holds each rule to Google’s documented syntax. The plain rules take no value. The max rules take a number or a fixed keyword, and unavailable_after takes a date in one of the formats Google names. Anything else is flagged as not a rule Google documents, which catches typos, invented values and rules from other search engines. One rule is called out separately: Google states that noarchive is no longer used, so keeping it does nothing for Google Search.

    Sources

    1. 1.Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications - Google Search CentralPrimary
    2. 2.RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol - IETF
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