Meta Robots
Definition
Meta robots is an HTML meta tag that gives crawlers page-level instructions such as index/noindex and follow/nofollow.
By Vinespire Editorial Team, Editorial ·
This term is part of the full AI search glossary.
Full definition
The common form is <meta name="robots" content="…"> in the document head. Values can target all bots or specific user-agents (for example googlebot). Directives are requests honored by well-behaved crawlers, not access control.
Meta robots complements robots.txt: robots.txt governs fetching paths; meta robots (and X-Robots-Tag) govern indexing and link-following after a page is retrieved. A page disallowed in robots.txt may never be crawled enough to read its meta tag.
Correct meta robots hygiene keeps thin or private templates out of the index while leaving public guides available to search and AI retrieval. See noindex, X-Robots-Tag, and Indexability.
Example
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow, max-image-preview:large" />