Wondering “can Google index this page?” Indexability comes down to a handful of signals a crawler reads, and most of them live right in the page’s HTML and response headers. Here is how to check them quickly and what each one means.
What controls indexability
When a search engine decides whether to index a page, it looks at several signals:
- Meta robots: a
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">tag tells crawlers to keep the page out of the index. - X-Robots-Tag: the same instruction delivered as an HTTP response header, easy to miss because it is not visible in the page body.
- Canonical: a
<link rel="canonical">pointing somewhere else tells search engines the other URL is the real version, so this one may not get indexed. - Meta refresh: a redirect baked into the HTML that can muddy how a page is treated.
A page can look perfect to a visitor and still be quietly blocked by any one of these.
robots.txt is a separate layer
It helps to separate two ideas. Indexability signals like noindex control whether a page appears in search results. robots.txt is a different, crawl-control layer that tells bots which URLs they may request at all. A page can be allowed in robots.txt yet still carry a noindex, or blocked from crawling while having no index directive. The Indexability Checker focuses on the indexing signals in your HTML and headers, not robots.txt crawl rules.
Check a page in three steps
The tool inspects exactly what you paste. It does not fetch the URL for you, which keeps everything fast and fully client-side.
- Open the page in your browser and view source, then copy the HTML.
- Copy the response headers (your browser’s Network tab shows them under the document request).
- Paste both into the Indexability Checker and read the verdict.
You get a clear yes or no on whether the page can be indexed, plus a breakdown of which signal is responsible. Because it only reads pasted text, nothing leaves your device.
Reading the verdict
If the verdict says a page is blocked, trace it back to the flagged signal. A stray noindex left over from staging is the most common culprit, followed by an X-Robots-Tag set at the server. A canonical pointing at the wrong URL will not block indexing outright, but it can stop the page from ranking under its own address, so it is worth fixing too.
Related tools
- WordPress Theme & Plugin Detector: see what is powering a site before you audit its SEO setup.
- Social Media Preview: check how the same page looks when shared, another signal pulled from its HTML.
- WordPress Salt Generator: handy when you are hardening the WordPress site you just checked.
Paste your HTML and headers, read the verdict, and you will know in seconds whether Google can index the page.