What the Meta Tag Checker reads
- <title> and <meta name="description">: presence, length in characters and in pixels, duplicates.
- <meta name="robots"> and googlebot, plus the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header when the page is fetched.
- <link rel="canonical">: whether it's absolute and whether it points to the page itself.
- <meta name="viewport">, the <html lang> attribute and the character set.
- Open Graph (og:*) and Twitter/X card (twitter:*) tags used when the page is shared.
Why meta tags still matter
The title and description are usually what people see in search results, so they decide whether someone clicks. The robots tag and the canonical decide whether the page is indexed at all, and under which URL. A single wrong value (a leftover noindex, a canonical pointing to the staging site) can hide a page completely.
Keywords meta tags are not checked: major search engines have ignored them for years.
Frequently asked questions
Does Google always use my meta description?
No. Google rewrites the snippet when it thinks another passage answers the search better. A clear, accurate description is still used most of the time.
What's the difference between the robots meta tag and robots.txt?
robots.txt tells crawlers which URLs they may download. The robots meta tag, read after downloading, tells them whether to index the page and follow its links. A page blocked in robots.txt can't show its noindex tag to crawlers.
Why do you check the X-Robots-Tag header?
It does the same job as the robots meta tag but in the HTTP response, and it's often set by a server or CDN rule without anyone noticing. It's only visible when the page is fetched from a URL.