Meta tags
Meta tags are lines of HTML in a page's head that describe the page to browsers, search engines and social networks, without showing on the page.
Meta tags are short lines of HTML in the <head> of a page that describe the page to machines. Visitors don't see them on the page. Browsers, search engines, social networks and other tools read them to learn what the page is, how to show it and what they're allowed to do with it.
You don't need to know HTML to use most of them. Your CMS or SEO plugin usually has a field for each.
The ones that matter
A few meta tags do real work:
- The meta description, a summary search engines may show under your title
- The meta robots tag, which tells search engines whether to index the page and show snippets from it
- The viewport tag, which tells phones how to size the page
- The charset tag, which sets how the text is encoded
- Open Graph and similar tags, which control how a link looks when it's shared
The title tag isn't strictly a meta tag, but it lives in the same place and is usually counted with them. Google lists the tags it reads in its guide to meta tags Google supports. Anything not on that list, Google ignores.
For example, Harrow & Pine's page for its oak bench might have this in its head:
<title>Oak bench, 120cm | Harrow & Pine</title>
<meta name="description" content="Solid oak bench, 120cm, made in Yorkshire. Free delivery in the UK.">
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:-1">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">Meta tags and AI search
Some meta tags reach AI answers and some don't. The robots tag does at Google, where rules like noindex and nosnippet also apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode. The meta description mostly doesn't, because AI answers write their own summary from what's on the page. Other AI platforms set their own rules about which tags they follow, so check each company's page about its bots.
In AnswerOrbit, A title and headings is one of the eight page checks we run on a page.