Indexability
In one line
Indexability is whether a crawled page is actually eligible to be stored in the search index — a page can be crawlable yet still not indexable.
Going deeper
Indexability is constantly confused with crawlability. Crawlability is whether a bot can fetch the page; indexability is whether the result is eligible to be stored in the index. A page with no robots.txt block but a noindex tag is crawlable but not indexable.
The standard checklist is five lines: noindex meta or X-Robots header, canonical pointing at the right URL (usually itself), 200 status, content actually rendered after JS, and no blocked resources breaking that render. Get those five clean and the page is almost certainly eligible.
Indexability carries straight over to AI search. GPTBot, PerplexityBot and the rest read the same robots, noindex and canonical signals, so 'indexable' is effectively the same gate as 'eligible to be cited'.
Related terms
Meta Robots Tag
The meta robots tag sits in the page <head> and tells crawlers whether to index it and follow its links — the per-page lever for indexing policy.
SEOX-Robots-Tag
X-Robots-Tag is the HTTP response header version of the meta robots directive — useful when you need to control indexing for non-HTML assets like PDFs, images and other binaries.
SEOIndex Bloat
Index bloat is the state where too many low-value or duplicate URLs are sitting in the search index, dragging down the site's average quality and indirectly hurting rankings.
SEOJavaScript SEO
JavaScript SEO is the discipline of making sure JS-rendered pages get crawled and indexed correctly — usually via some combination of SSR, prerendering and hydration.
SEOOrphan Page
An orphan page is a URL that no other page on the site links to — invisible to internal navigation and badly disadvantaged in discovery, evaluation and ranking.
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