Meta tags

Which meta tags does Google support?

Google lists a limited set in its documentation:

• description offers a page summary that Google sometimes uses in the snippet.
• robots and googlebot control crawling and indexing. robots applies to all search engines, googlebot only to Google.
• viewport tells the browser how to render the page on mobile devices.
• charset (or Content-Type) sets the character set. UTF-8 is recommended.
• google-site-verification verifies ownership in Search Console.
• notranslate stops Google from offering translations, nopagereadaloud blocks its read-aloud services.
• rating marks adult content for SafeSearch.
• refresh redirects after a delay, but Google recommends a server-side 301 redirect instead.

Google states that the meta keywords tag is not used by Google Search and has no effect on indexing and ranking. Other values, such as next and prev link relations, are also not supported.

The title element sits in the same <head> and is often listed with meta tags, but technically it is a separate element. Open Graph tags for social networks are written as meta elements as well.

Example

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  <meta name="description" content="A short summary of the page in one or two sentences.">
  <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
</head>

FAQ

Are meta tags still useful? Several are. The robots tag, the viewport tag and the description have effects in Google Search as listed above. Others, such as keywords, have none.

Which meta tags are most important? Google does not rank them. In practice the robots tag matters for indexing, and the description can shape the snippet.

Last updated: October 7, 2026