How can a robots meta tag target Googlebot separately?

Definition: A robots meta tag places page-level crawling instructions in HTML. The name="googlebot" value targets Googlebot, while name="robots" supplies a directive for all crawlers.

Key facts

• Google's robots metadata reference, updated 24 March 2026, says that name="robots" applies to all crawlers and that the name and content attributes are case-insensitive.
• The same reference says that Google supports the googlebot and googlebot-news user agent tokens in robots meta tags. Other values are ignored.
• Separate directives for several crawlers use separate robots meta tags. Google gives googlebot and googlebot-news as an example.
• Google's common crawler documentation labels its larger token table for the User-agent: line in robots.txt, so that table and the robots meta token list answer different configuration questions.

How do you name Googlebot in HTML?

To target Googlebot, replace the generic robots value in the name attribute with the googlebot token. Google's reference uses this example for a Googlebot-specific snippet instruction:

<meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">

Google documents googlebot for all text results and googlebot-news for news results. A page can give those targets separate instructions with separate tags:

<meta name="googlebot" content="notranslate">
<meta name="googlebot-news" content="nosnippet">

The name and content attributes are case-insensitive. Google Search also respects robots meta tags in the body section of an HTML document, although the reference presents the tag in the page's head section.

How do generic and Googlebot-specific rules combine?

The generic robots value applies to all crawlers. A Googlebot-specific tag adds a rule for Googlebot. Google's documented combination is:

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

For multiple crawlers with different rules, Google says the search engine uses the sum of the negative rules. The page in this example therefore has nofollow and noindex when Googlebot crawls it. A crawler covered only by the generic tag receives nofollow.

Multiple rules can also appear as a comma-separated list in one content value. Google further states that conflicting robots rules use the more restrictive rule, with nosnippet taking precedence over max-snippet:50 in its example.

Which Google names belong in a robots meta tag?

As of 15 October 2026, Google's common crawler documentation describes user agent strings in HTTP requests and user agent tokens for the User-agent: line in robots.txt as separate columns. It says that Googlebot-News has no separate HTTP request user agent string and that crawling uses various Googlebot user agent strings.

That page also lists Googlebot-Image, Googlebot-Video, and Google-InspectionTool as crawler tokens in its robots.txt table. Google's robots metadata reference separately says that values other than its supported meta tokens are ignored. For a robots meta tag, use googlebot or googlebot-news when the intended target is one of the two documented Google Search result contexts.

How can you check whether the instruction is available?

Google says that robots meta tags and X-Robots-Tag headers are found when a URL is crawled. If robots.txt disallows the URL, Google says the indexing or serving rules will not be found and will be ignored. A page whose meta directive must be followed therefore needs to remain crawlable to Googlebot.

Related terms

• Meta robots
• noindex
• nofollow
• X-Robots-Tag

FAQ

Can name="googlebot" target Googlebot-News?

Google lists googlebot for all text results and googlebot-news for news results. Use googlebot-news for the news-results target.

Can generic and Googlebot-specific directives appear together?

Yes. Google's documented example uses one robots tag and one googlebot tag, then combines their negative rules for Googlebot.

Does a robots.txt disallow hide the meta directive from Google?

Yes. Google says that rules in a page cannot be found and followed when the URL is disallowed from crawling in robots.txt.

Sources

1. Google Search Central, "Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications", 24 March 2026
2. Google Crawling Infrastructure, "List of Google's common crawlers", 15 October 2026

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