Most tools check one signal at a time. This one ties all four together.
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4 signals, 1 report
Robots.txt, meta robots, X-Robots-Tag, and canonical — checked together instead of four separate tools and four separate mental models.
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Real robots.txt precedence rules
Follows Google's documented group-selection and Allow/Disallow tie-break logic, not a naive "does the path appear" check.
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Bot-specific checking
Check against Googlebot, Bingbot, or the wildcard group — since robots.txt rules can differ per crawler.
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Canonical awareness
Flags when a canonical tag defers to a different URL, even if the page itself is technically indexable.
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Plain-language verdict
One clear answer — indexable or blocked — with every contributing signal named, not just raw header dumps.
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100% client-side
Checks run from your browser or a CORS proxy chain. Nothing about the URLs you check is stored.
What does an indexability checker actually check?▾
It checks every signal that can keep a page out of search results: whether robots.txt disallows the path for a given crawler, whether a meta robots tag or X-Robots-Tag header contains noindex, and whether the canonical tag points somewhere else.
Why would a page be indexable in robots.txt but still not get indexed?▾
Robots.txt only controls whether a crawler can request a page at all. A page can be fully crawlable and still be excluded from the index by a noindex meta tag, a noindex X-Robots-Tag header, or by a canonical tag pointing to a different URL that Google indexes instead.
Which crawler does this tool check robots.txt against?▾
Googlebot by default, since it's the most commonly relevant crawler for indexing decisions, following the same group-selection and Allow/Disallow precedence rules Google documents for robots.txt.
Why can't this tool always confirm the X-Robots-Tag header?▾
Browsers hide most response headers for cross-origin requests unless the server explicitly exposes them, so a direct browser fetch sometimes can't read X-Robots-Tag even when it's present. When that happens, the tool notes it explicitly instead of guessing.
Is a canonical mismatch the same as being blocked from indexing?▾
No. A canonical tag pointing elsewhere doesn't block indexing outright, but it tells Google to consolidate ranking signals onto the canonical target instead of the page you're checking, which has a similar practical effect for that specific URL.