Where is the search engine visibility setting in WordPress?

Definition: As of 17 October 2026, the WordPress search engine visibility setting is under Settings > Reading in the administration dashboard. Its checkbox, Discourage search engines from indexing this site, asks search engines to exclude the site from their index while allowing visitors to access it.

Key facts

• WordPress's Reading settings documentation says the checkbox asks search engines to avoid indexing the site; Save Changes saves the selection.
• The WordPress core team's indexing change note documents a noindex,nofollow robots meta tag for sites with the option enabled.
• The WordPress function reference shows that wp_robots_noindex() checks the blog_public option before adding the indexing restriction.
• Google's noindex documentation requires crawl access so Googlebot, Google's crawler, can read a page's noindex rule.

Where is the checkbox, and which state suits a public site?

WordPress's installation FAQ gives the navigation path Settings > Reading from the administration screen. The control appears under Search Engine Visibility, with the label Discourage search engines from indexing this site.

For a public website intended for search indexing, the checkbox stays clear. Selecting it requests exclusion from search indexes. The Reading screen documentation specifies Save Changes to store changes in the database and describes a confirmation message at the top of the screen after saving.

What does WordPress output when the checkbox is selected?

A robots meta tag is an HTML element that carries instructions for web crawlers. The WordPress core team's change note gives this output for the enabled setting:

<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

The tag requests exclusion from indexing and discourages further crawling of the website. The Reading documentation places the tag in the page's <head> section when the theme uses wp_head.

The core note identifies WordPress 5.3 as the change that removes the setting's previous Disallow: / output from robots.txt, the file that controls crawler access. Checking robots.txt alone therefore misses the documented indexing restriction in the page HTML.

How can the output be checked?

The relevant HTML check is the public page's <head> section: a robots meta tag containing noindex requests exclusion. After clearing the checkbox and saving, inspecting that output checks whether the page still carries the restriction.

Google's debugging guidance recommends the URL Inspection tool to see the HTML Googlebot receives. Its Page Indexing report in Search Console also identifies pages from which Googlebot extracts a noindex rule. Google needs access to the page to read the instruction, so an additional robots.txt block can prevent that check.

Related terms

• Meta robots
• noindex
• robots.txt
• X-Robots-Tag

FAQ

Does selecting the checkbox make my site private?

WordPress's Reading documentation says normal visitors can still access the site. You need a separate access restriction for private content.

Why can a page still appear after I select the checkbox?

Google's noindex guidance explains that Googlebot must revisit the page to see the rule. Depending on the page's importance on the internet, that revisit can take months; you can request a recrawl through URL Inspection.

Sources

1. WordPress.org, "Settings Reading screen", updated 8 June 2024
2. WordPress.org, "FAQ Installation", updated 12 January 2023
3. Make WordPress Core, "Changes to prevent search engines indexing sites.", 2 September 2019
4. WordPress Developer Resources, "wp_robots_noindex()", undated
5. Google Search Central, "Block Search indexing with noindex", updated 10 December 2025

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