Hiding your site from search engines and AI crawlers

Hide your site from search engines and AI crawlers while leaving the site available for visitors to access.

You can hide your site from search engines and AI web crawlers, while leaving it available for visitors to access.

Changes to your site won't reflect on Google until they re-index or re-crawl your site, which usually takes some time. To learn more, visit The wrong information is displaying in Google search results or Google's documentation on removing results from search.

To review all options for hiding content on your site, visit Controlling who can access your site's pages.

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What are crawlers?

A web crawler is a type of bot, typically operated by search engines, that automatically scans the content of websites across the Internet, so their content can appear in search results.

Web crawlers are also used by AI companies to train their large language models (LLMs). These models learn from the content of websites they scan, and use the data to improve the accuracy and general capabilities of their AI models.

Hiding your site from search engines or AI crawlers

To hide your whole site from search engines or AI crawlers:

1. Open the Settings panel.
2. Click Crawlers
3. To hide your site from search engine crawlers, switch the Search engine crawlers toggle off.
4. To hide your site from AI crawlers, switch the Artificial Intelligence crawlers toggle off.

Switching the Artificial Intelligence crawlers toggle off modifies your robots.txt file to block the following bots from crawling your site:

• Anthropic AI
• CCBot
• Google Extended
• GPTBot and ChatGPT-User

Note: It's currently not possible to hide specific pages from AI crawlers, or hide your site from all AI crawlers. Hiding your site from AI crawlers doesn't retroactively remove content previously scraped from a site from AI model training data.

Hiding a specific page from search engines

Adding a "noindex" tag to a page hides it from search engines, while leaving it public and available for visitors to access.

There are two options for adding a noindex tag:

• Page settings - Check Hide this page from search results in the SEO tab of page settings.
• Code injection - Add the code manually with code injection.

Page settings vs. code injection

Adding a noindex tag by checking Hide this page from search results in page settings vs. adding a noindex tag through code injection creates similar effects. Usually, you can use the page settings option.

With either method:

• Adding the tag to a collection page also hides its collection items. This includes the individual products on a products page.
• You can't hide individual collection items or portfolio sub-pages.
• Adding the tag to an index page (version 7.0) doesn't hide its sub-pages. To hide all pages, add the tag to the main index and each sub-page.
• Adding the tag doesn't hide pages from site search, only external search engines.

The differences are listed in the table below.

Enable the tag in page settings

To enable the noindex tag for a page:

1. Open the Pages panel.
2. Hover over the page and click the .
3. Click the SEO tab.
4. Switch the Hide from search engines toggle on. Blog pages have more options.

Tip: Homepages and individual collection items don't have a Hide from search engines toggle.

Add the tag with code injection

Code injection is a Premium feature available in Business and Commerce plans.

You can add a noindex tag manually to code injection with the following code snippet:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Add the code snippet to the Page header code injection in page settings. Adding this to a collection page (like a blog page) also hides its collection items (like blog posts).

Tip: If you downgrade to a plan that doesn't support Premium features, code injection is automatically disabled.

Note: Custom code modifications fall outside the scope of our support. This means that we’re unable to help further with setup or troubleshooting. Additionally, with a code-based solution, we can’t guarantee its functionality or full compatibility with Squarespace. This includes how it functions with our responsive design, particularly its appearance on mobile devices, and if it functions on all templates. Custom code can also cause display issues with future updates to our platform. While we can't help further, there are many resources that can point you in the right direction:

• Learn best practices for adding custom code.
• Read our general guide on third-party customizations.
• Visit Squarespace Forum, our customer and developer community.
• Hire a Squarespace Expert to help build custom code for your site.