Meta Tags
Meta tags are lines of HTML in the head of a web page, the part visitors don't see, that pass information about the page to search engines, browsers and other software. Google's documentation lists the ones it supports, including the description, robots and viewport tags, and says software reads the tags it supports and ignores the rest.
Source: Google Search Central, Meta tags and attributes that Google supports, checked October 29, 2026
What Meta Tags means for your business
The two you'll hear about most are the meta description, the summary Google may show under your result, and the title tag, which is its own HTML element but usually gets lumped in with meta tags. Each has its own entry in this glossary.
The robots meta tag is the one that can quietly hurt you, because a stray noindex keeps a page out of Google (our noindex entry covers how that happens). The viewport tag tells phones how to size the page, and the google-site-verification tag proves to Search Console that the site is yours.
One tag isn't worth your time. Google says, "The meta-keyword tag is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all." If a plugin asks you to fill it in, leave it blank. Tags for link previews on social apps, like Open Graph, come from another standard and aren't on this list, though Google does read one of them, og:site_name, when it picks your site's name.
If you're not sure which tags your site sends, or a page dropped out of Google with no warning, auditing what your pages tell search engines is where we'd begin.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview cited Google's own meta tags page first, beside SEO tool blogs, MDN, W3Schools and YouTube. ChatGPT gave a similar list with code samples and cited nothing, and both said Google ignores the keywords tag.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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