SeoGuard
Noticeagents.noai-meta

A noai tag no AI company says it reads

Why it matters

noai and noimageai in a robots meta tag spread as a way of asking AI companies not to train on a page. None of the companies running the big AI crawlers lists them:

  • Google's list of the robots rules it supports has no noai or noimageai.
  • OpenAI says it uses "OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot robots.txt tags to enable webmasters to manage how their sites and content work with AI".
  • Anthropic says its bots honour "industry standard directives in robots.txt".
  • Microsoft's own page-level preferences, honoured from 1 February 2027, are ai-training and ai-grounding under Bingbot.

Some smaller tools may read noai; the big ones don't say they do. So a site relying on it has asked, and very likely not been heard. This isn't about whether the site should opt out of training, which is its own business: only about whether the way it asked works.

Sources: Google: robots meta tag rules, OpenAI: crawlers, Anthropic: how site owners can prevent crawling, Microsoft: preferences for training and grounding.

How to fix it

Say it in robots.txt, to the training crawlers by name. This keeps the search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot) free, so the site can still be cited in AI answers:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

The noai tag can stay: it does no harm, and it may count with someone.

Examples

These are the rule's own test pages, and what it says about each. They are run on every change to the rule book.

<html lang="en">
<title>A page</title>
<h1>A page</h1>
x-robots-tag
noimageai

NoticeThe page asks AI not to use it with noimageai, which none of Google, OpenAI, Anthropic or Microsoft says it reads. Their crawlers follow robots.txt.

fail-noai-header
<html lang="en">
<title>A page</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noai, noimageai">
<h1>A page</h1>

NoticeThe page asks AI not to use it with noai or noimageai, which none of Google, OpenAI, Anthropic or Microsoft says it reads. Their crawlers follow robots.txt.

fail-noai
<html lang="en">
<title>A page</title>
<meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large">
<h1>A page</h1>

PassedThe page's robots rules don't lean on noai or noimageai.

pass-robots-rules